Maternal Depression and Motherese: Temporal and Intonational Features

Bettes, Barbara A.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1988.tb03261.x

Cited by 114 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Research has found that voice quality, pitch and intonation are affected by maternal mood symptoms (Bettes, 1988;Scherer, 1986). Given that within community samples, mothers show significant variation in maternal psychological health (also see Jones et al, 2013), differences in voice quality may also occur.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Infant face interest is associated with voice information and maternal psychological health

Taylor

Slade

Herbert

2014

Infant Behavior and Development

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Early infant interest in their mother's face is driven by an experience based face processing system, and is associated with maternal psychological health, even within a non clinical community sample. The present study examined the role of the voice in eliciting infants' interest in mother and stranger faces and in the association between infant face interest and maternal psychological health.Infants aged 3.5-months were shown photographs of their mother's and a stranger's face paired with an audio recording of their mother's and a stranger's voice that was either matched (e.g., mother's face and voice) or mismatched (e.g., mother's face and stranger's voice). Infants spent more time attending to the stranger's matched face and voice than the mother's matched face and voice and the mismatched faces and voices. Thus, infants demonstrated an earlier preference for a stranger's face when given voice information than when the face is presented alone. In the present sample, maternal psychological health varied with 56.7% of mothers reporting mild mood symptoms (depression, anxiety or stress response to childbirth). Infants of mothers with significant mild maternal mood symptoms looked longer at the faces and voices compared to infants of mothers who did not report mild maternal mood symptoms. In sum, infants' experience based face processing system is sensitive to their mothers' maternal psychological health and the multimodal nature of faces. Early infant interest in their mother's face is driven by an experience based face processing system, and is associated with maternal psychological health, even within a non clinical community sample. The present study examined the role of the voice in eliciting infants' interest in mother and stranger faces and in the association between infant face interest and maternal psychological health.Infants aged 3.5-months were shown photographs of their mother's and a stranger's face paired with an audio recording of their mother's and a stranger's voice that was either matched (e.g., mother's face and voice) or mismatched (e.g., mother's face and stranger's voice). Infants spent more time attending to the stranger's matched face and voice than the mother's matched face and voice and the mismatched faces and voices. Thus, infants demonstrated an earlier preference for a stranger's face when given voice information than when the face is presented alone. In the present sample, maternal psychological health varied with 56.7% of mothers reporting mild mood symptoms (depression, anxiety or stress response to childbirth). Infants of mothers with significant mild maternal mood symptoms looked longer at the faces and voices compared to infants of mothers who did not report mild maternal mood symptoms. In sum, infants' experience based face processing system is sensitive to their mothers' maternal psychological health and the multimodal nature of faces.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The stranger's voice was recorded under the same conditions. The same stranger's voice recording was presented to all infants in order to control for differences in the length of the recording and in voice quality, pitch and intonation (see Bettes, 1988;Scherer, 1986).…”

Section: Face/voice Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Infant face interest is associated with voice information and maternal psychological health

Taylor

Slade

Herbert

2014

Infant Behavior and Development

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“…Depressed mothers do not modify their speaking style (43,44) to produce the exaggerated "motherese" that infants prefer (45)(46)(47)(48), and which can highlight speech sound differences (49). Newborns of depressed mothers fail to show face/voice preference (22) whereas older infants do not learn as well from their mothers' infant-directed speech (50).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception

Weikum

Oberlander

Hensch

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

172

107

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Language acquisition reflects a complex interplay between biology and early experience. Psychotropic medication exposure has been shown to alter neural plasticity and shift sensitive periods in perceptual development. Notably, serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) are antidepressant agents increasingly prescribed to manage antenatal mood disorders, and depressed maternal mood per se during pregnancy impacts infant behavior, also raising concerns about long-term consequences following such developmental exposure. We studied whether infants' language development is altered by prenatal exposure to SRIs and whether such effects differ from exposure to maternal mood disturbances. Infants from non-SRI-treated mothers with little or no depression (control), depressed but non-SRI-treated (depressed-only), and depressed and treated with an SRI (SRI-exposed) were studied at 36 wk gestation (while still in utero) on a consonant and vowel discrimination task and at 6 and 10 mo of age on a nonnative speech and visual language discrimination task. Whereas the control infants responded as expected (success at 6 mo and failure at 10 mo) the SRI-exposed infants failed to discriminate the language differences at either age and the depressed-only infants succeeded at 10 mo instead of 6 mo. Fetuses at 36 wk gestation in the control condition performed as expected, with a response on vowel but not consonant discrimination, whereas the SRI-exposed fetuses showed accelerated perceptual development by discriminating both vowels and consonants. Thus, prenatal depressed maternal mood and SRI exposure were found to shift developmental milestones bidirectionally on infant speech perception tasks.L anguage, our most quintessential human characteristic, involves a complex interplay between biology and experience. At birth, infants possess an initial preparedness for language and a developmental readiness that supports learning any of the world's languages (1-3), yet also already show privileged processing to the native language from prenatal listening experience (4-6). During the following weeks and months of life, infants become progressively attuned to the properties of their native language, including its rhythmical and segmental (e.g., consonant) information (reviewed in refs. 7 and 8). The high degree of regularity in the timing of sequential tuning to properties of the native language suggests a series of critical or sensitive periods, i.e., points in development when the system is maximally influenced by input.The timing of onset of these sensitive periods seems to be maturationally constrained. Infants born 3 mo preterm attune to the phonetic properties (9) of their native language at the same gestational age as full-term infants, not according to the number of months of postnatal listening experience. Such maturational constraints can protect development: ensuring the optimal consecutive stabilization of the perceptual components that contribute in a step-wise fashion to language acquisition (10). However, it is known from research i...

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“…A large body of research points to disordered mother-infant interactions as a significant correlate of maternal depression (Cohn & Campbell, 1992), and one that may affect infant cognitive development through consequences of dysregulated arousal and attention (Field, 1994;Tronick & Gianino, 1996). Prolonged interactions with a partner who is low in sensitivity and contingent responding, as are depressed caregivers (Bettes, 1988;Murray et al, 1993;Zlochower & Cohn, 1991) may, through a conditioning process such as latent inhibition (Lubow, 1989) or learned irrelevance (Linden et al, 1997), teach an 5 Prior research in our laboratory has investigated whether matches versus mismatches in affective information in voices and faces affect infant learning. For example, Kaplan et al (1997) showed that ID speech rated as happy-sounding by adults was equally well associated with a smiling or a sad face by four-month-old infants of non-depressed mothers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because ID speech produced by mothers with comparatively more symptoms of depression was known to possess a significantly lower extent of fundamental frequency (F 0 ) modulation (Bettes, 1988) -an important acoustic cue in maternal ID speech (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987) -we predicted that ID speech recorded from mothers with comparatively more symptoms of depression would be less effective at promoting voice-face associations in this paradigm. Kaplan, Bachorowski, & Zarlengo-Strouse (1999) recorded brief segments of ID speech from 20 mothers who varied in symptoms of depression, and later used them to signal a smiling face reinforcer for 20 groups of 4-month-old infants of non-depressed mothers.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Infant-directed speech produced by fathers with symptoms of depression: Effects on infant associative learning in a conditioned-attention paradigm

Kaplan¹,

Sliter²,

Burgess³

2007

Infant Behavior and Development

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Infant-directed (ID) speech produced by fathers who varied in their number of self-reported symptoms of depressed was analyzed for differences its ability to promote infant voice-face associative learning. Infants of fathers with elevated scores on the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) showed significantly poorer learning than did infants of fathers with non-elevated BDI-II scores when their fathers' ID speech served as a conditioned stimulus for a face reinforcer in a conditioned-attention paradigm. Fathers with elevated BDI-II scores produced ID speech with marginally significantly lower F 0 variability than fathers with non-elevated BDI-II scores. However, F 0 -related cues were uncorrelated with infant learning. Overall, fathers' ID speech contained significantly less F 0 modulation than did mothers' ID speech. These findings show that paternal depression, like maternal depression, adversely affects infant learning in a conditioned-attention paradigm.

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Maternal Depression and Motherese: Temporal and Intonational Features

Cited by 114 publications

References 7 publications

Infant face interest is associated with voice information and maternal psychological health

Infant face interest is associated with voice information and maternal psychological health

Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception

Infant-directed speech produced by fathers with symptoms of depression: Effects on infant associative learning in a conditioned-attention paradigm

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