Teacher talk: Infant vocal cues affect non-lead infant teachers’ responding

Albert, Rachel R.

doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2020.12.008

Cited by 2 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…Thus, infants' vocal production makes them active contributors in shaping their learning opportunities. These findings add to a growing body of work demonstrating the social functions of babbling for promoting early language development (Albert, 2021;Albert et al, 2018;Elmlinger et al, 2019;Gros-Louis & Miller, 2018;Warlaumont et al, 2014). These results also extend the findings of previous work highlighting speech simplification in parent-infant interactions (Elmlinger et al, 2019).…”

Section: Teacher Characteristicssupporting

confidence: 85%

“…A recent study demonstrated that classroom teachers could differentiate infant vocalizations based on phonological characteristics (Albert, 2021). However, teachers were influenced by infant gaze more than vocal quality when responding to pre‐recorded examples of infant behavior (Albert, 2021). Teachers are also more responsive in general when infants use pointing and other gestures (Vallotton, Decker, et al., 2017), particularly when the infants are responding contingently to them (Vallotton, 2009).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Speech-like vocalizations may prompt more sensitive contingent responses because they attract the caregiver's attention and align it with the focus of the infant's gaze. A recent study demonstrated that classroom teachers could differentiate infant vocalizations based on phonological characteristics (Albert, 2021). However, teachers were influenced by infant gaze more than vocal quality when responding to pre-recorded examples of infant behavior (Albert, 2021).…”

Section: Vocal Quality and Teacher Respondingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Infants are also more likely to produce subsequent advanced vocalizations following caregiver responses to mature syllables (Gros‐Louis & Miller, 2018). While mothers show selectively by responding to more advanced than to less advanced vocalizations (Albert et al., 2018; Gros‐Louis et al., 2006), childcare teachers show similar rates of responding to pre‐recorded examples of infant vocalizations regardless of vocal quality (Albert, 2021). The current study investigates whether infant vocal quality impacts responding in live teacher‐infant interactions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Infant vocalizations elicit simplified speech in childcare

Albert

Ernst

Vallotton

2022

Infancy

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Infant babbling has an important social function in promoting early language development by attracting caregiver attention and prompting parents' contingent, simplified speech, which is more learnable for infants. Here, we demonstrate that prelinguistic infant vocalizations also create learning opportunities for infants in childcare settings by eliciting simplified and more learnable linguistic information during teacher‐infant interactions. We compared the rates and complexity of contingent and non‐contingent verbal interactions of 34 childcare teachers during a one‐on‐one free play interaction with a familiar infant under their care (M = 12.6 months old). As compared to non‐contingent utterances, teachers' contingent utterances included fewer unique words, a higher proportion of single‐word responses, and a shorter mean length of utterances. Teachers did not change their response length based on infants' syllable type and were equally likely to respond to vowels and consonant‐vowel vocalizations. Sources of individual differences in the simplification effect related to infant behaviors and teacher characteristics are discussed. The results parallel previous findings demonstrating the simplification effect in parent‐infant interactions. That teachers also show this simplification effect when responding to infant vocalizations suggests the power of infant prelinguistic vocalizations for organizing caregiver attention in various settings to elicit simplified, learnable language.

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