Mother-infant social gaze dynamics relate to infant brain activity and word segmentation

Infants show systematic rhythmic motor responses while listening to rhythmic speech

“…Past research has revealed that infants’ speech segmentation skills are subject to individual variability. Factors that are associated with their speech segmentation performance are, for example, their babbling skills ( Hoareau et al, 2019 ) and their later lexicon size ( Newman et al, 2006 ; Junge et al, 2012 ), but also environmental factors such as the quantity of infant-directed speech input ( Hoareau et al, 2019 ) and social interactions with their mother ( Vanoncini et al, 2022 , 2024 ). In segmentation experiments using the head-turn paradigm, individual differences are often revealed as follows.…”

“…Results of studies targeted at identifying predictors of infant speech segmentation performance are in line with this: novelty preferences are exhibited by infants who have more advanced babbling skills ( Hoareau et al, 2019 ) and higher later word knowledge ( Singh et al, 2012 ), reflecting that matureness in language development is associated with novelty preferences. Moreover, novelty preferences are more likely in infants whose mothers show less predictable social gaze behavior ( Vanoncini et al, 2024 ) and whose mothers are more in emotional synchrony with their babies, suggesting that social aspects may also be a source of individual differences. The significant correlations between infants’ listening preferences and the probed predictors in these studies also signalize that the strength of infants’ preferences, expressed by the magnitude of their listening preferences, is increased in infants with a more mature language development.…”