Maternal depression and the learning-promoting effects of infant-directed speech: Roles of maternal sensitivity, depression diagnosis, and speech acoustic cues

Abstract

The hypothesis that the associative learning-promoting effects of infant-directed speech (IDS) depend on infants’ social experience was tested in a conditioned-attention paradigm with a cumulative sample of 4- to 14-month-old infants. Following six forward pairings of a brief IDS segment and a photographic slide of a smiling female face, infants of clinically depressed mothers exhibited evidence of having acquired significantly weaker voice–face associations than infants of non-depressed mothers. Regression analyses revealed that maternal depression was significantly related to infant learning even after demographic correlates of depression, antidepressant medication use, and extent of pitch modulation in maternal IDS had been taken into account. However, after maternal depression had been accounted for, maternal emotional availability, coded by blind raters from separate play interactions, accounted for significant further increments in the proportion of variance accounted for in infant learning scores. Both maternal depression and maternal insensitivity negatively, and additively, predicted poor learning.

Consequences of maternal postpartum depression: A systematic review of maternal and infant outcomes

“…Of the 11 studies, 7 94,95,99,101,102,107,147 indicated a significant and negative association between maternal postpartum depressive symptoms and cognitive development in children (Table 10). One of the studies 147 specifically emphasized the important role of maternal insensitivity in delays in children’s cognitive development. The eighth study 141 underlined the indirect effect of maternal PPD on cognitive development, which occurred as a result of maternal depressive symptoms that impacted the quality of the home environment and had a direct effect on early child development.…”

Mature neural responses to Infant-Directed Speech but not Adult-Directed Speech in Pre-Verbal Infants

“…It will be of interest in future research to investigate whether similar response patterns can be generated by vowels that were not produced in IDS, but that share some of the acoustic qualities characteristic of this register. In addition, these individual components can be absent or modified even in IDS, when speech is produced under certain circumstances, e.g., by mothers with post-natal depression 77 78 or when IDS is addressed to infants with impaired hearing 15 79 . Thus, it is of interest for future research to focus on disentangling the role of each IDS quality on neural processing of speech and its implications for the development of early language skills in typically and atypically developing infant populations.…”

Infant-directed speech from seven to nineteen months has similar acoustic properties but different functions

“…Effects of infants' age on the acoustic components of IDS IDS is the product of the dynamic interaction of variables associated with the mother (Kaplan, Danko, Cejka, & Everhart, 2015;Kaplan, Danko, Kalinka, & Cejka, 2012), the infant (Kalashnikova, Goswami, & Burnham, 2018;Lam & Kitamura, 2010), and the quality of their interaction (Lam & Kitamura, 2012;Smith & Trainor, 2008). Some dynamic adjustments of IDS are attributed to mothers' sensitivity to their infants' needs (Papoušek, 2007).…”