Parents’ contingent responses in communication with 10-month-old children in a clinical group with typical or late babbling

Abstract

Parental responsive behaviour in communication has a positive effect on child speech and language development. Absence of canonical babbling (CB) in 10-month-old infants is considered a risk factor for developmental difficulties, yet little is known about parental responsiveness in this group of children. The purpose of the current study was to examine proportion and type of parental responsive utterances after CB and vocalization utterances respectively in a clinical group of children with otitis media with effusion, with or without cleft palate. Audio-video recordings of interactions in free play situations with 22 parents and their 10-monthold infants were used, where 15 infants had reached the CB stage and 7 infants had not. Fifty consecutive child utterances were annotated and categorized as vocalization utterance or CB utterance. The parent's following contingent response was annotated and labelled as acknowledgements, follow-in comments, imitations/expansions or directives. The Average intra-judge agreement was 90%, and the average interjudger agreement was 84%. There was no significant difference in proportion contingent responses after vocalizations and CB, neither when considering all child utterances nor the child's babbling stage. However, imitations/expansions tended to be more common after CB in the typical babbling group, whereas acknowledgements were more common after CB in the late babbling group. Our findings imply that responsiveness is a supportive strategy that is not fully used by parents of children with late babbling. Implications for further research as well as parent-directed intervention for children in clinical groups with late babbling are suggested.

Relationship Between Parent Vowel Hyperarticulation in Infant-Directed Speech and Infant Phonetic Complexity on the Level of Conversational Turns

“…It can, however, be considered a reasonable level of agreement when transcribing young infants' vocalizations on this level of detail. Previous studies with less detailed annotations (e.g., canonical babbling vs. non-canonical babbling or syllable counts) report between 70 and 84% interrater reliability (Warlaumont and Ramsdell-Hudock, 2016;Lieberman et al, 2019), and the agreement in this study lies within that range (70 and 78%).…”

Better speech outcomes after very early palatal repair?—A longitudinal case-control study in Ugandan children with cleft palate

“…This is in contrast with the hypothesis that palatal closure before the onset of canonical babbling should reduce the anchoring of wrong patterns in the child's developing phonological system and, as a result, should minimize the occurrence of a compensatory articulation pattern (Dorf & Curtin, 1982). However, compensatory articulation may result from a complex interplay of several influencing factors, of which timing of palatal closure may be one, but also anatomy and physiology of the velopharyngeal area, hearing, speech input and other unknown variables need to be considered (Lancaster et al, 2020;Lieberman et al, 2019;Lohmander et al, 2021). Although most children catch up over time, even without being enrolled in speech therapy, the presence of compensatory articulation and a decreased speech understandability and acceptability during childhood may have an impact on the child's psychosocial functioning (Murray et al, 2010).…”

A protocol for a randomized‐controlled trial to investigate the effect of infant sign training on the speech–language development in young children born with cleft palate

“…Recordings are made by two static cameras and annotated using ELAN, a free computer software system for multimodal complex annotation of video and audio recorded material (ELAN 2021). The annotation process includes three steps: the child's communicative acts, the caregiver's contingent responses and a third step where annotations for child and caregiver are controlled following the procedure described by Lieberman et al (2019). Each potential communicative act of the child is annotated by the means of communication (eye contact, gesture or vocalization; vocalization is identified as non-canonical, canonical or word) following the procedure described by Scherer et al (2013).…”

“…Gestures are classified as behaviour regulation, social interaction and joint attention following the procedure described by Stewart et al (2021). The caregiver contingent responses are categorized and labelled as acknowledgements, follow-in comments, imitations/expansions or directives following the procedure described by Lieberman et al (2019). Based on these annotations, the number and quality of the child's and caregiver's communicative acts are determined.…”

“…Early delays in speech–language development may have an impact on caregiver–child interactions. Caregivers provide less complex semantic input in response to children with CP ± L who produce less canonical babbling utterances (Lieberman et al., 2019) or who produce less intelligible speech with lower word rates (Frey et al., 2018). Hence, caregivers’ responsive and language‐facilitating behaviour is determined by infant input.…”