The social functions of babbling: acoustic and contextual characteristics that facilitate maternal responsiveness

Abstract

What is the social function of babbling? An important function of prelinguistic vocalizing may be to elicit parental behavior in ways that facilitate the infant's own learning about speech and language. Infants use parental feedback to their babbling to learn new vocal forms, but the microstructure of parental responses to babbling has not been studied. To enable precise manipulation of the proximal infant cues that may influence maternal behavior, we used a playback paradigm to assess mothers' responsiveness to prerecorded audiovisual clips of unfamiliar infants' noncry prelinguistic vocalizations and actions. Acoustic characteristics and directedness of vocalizations were manipulated to test their efficacy in structuring social interactions. We also compared maternal responsiveness in the playback paradigm and in free play with their own infants. Maternal patterns of reactions to babbling were stable across both tasks. In the playback task, we found specific vocal cues, such as the degree of resonance and the transition timing of consonant-vowel syllables, predicted contingent maternal responding. Vocalizations directed at objects also facilitated increased responsiveness. The responses mothers exhibited, such as sensitive speech and vocal imitation, are known to facilitate vocal learning and development. Infants, by influencing the behavior of their caregivers with their babbling, create social interactions that facilitate their own communicative development.

Female Social Feedback Reveals Non-imitative Mechanisms of Vocal Learning in Zebra Finches

“…These results are also the first experimental demonstration that the song ontogeny of young male zebra finches can be significantly influenced by contingent visual displays from non-singing conspecifics. As human infants also use contingent social feedback to guide vocal development [5,6], our results provide evidence for a previously unknown parallel between zebra finch song acquisition and human speech development. The presence of socially guided vocal learning in zebra finches suggests that this active form of learning, which most closely resembles human learning of speech, may be more common than previously thought.…”

“…However, the degree to which songbirds and humans share social mechanisms of vocal learning is unknown. Although it has been demonstrated as a vocal learning mechanism in human infants [3][4][5][6], learning via active social feedback is considered rare and atypical among non-human animals [7]. We report here the first evidence that song learning in the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), the most common model species of vocal learning and development, utilizes socially guided vocal learning.…”

Infants’ statistical word segmentation in an artificial language is linked to both parental speech input and reported production abilities

“…First, the correlation analyses failed to reveal links between input measures and production abilities. While production milestones have sometimes been linked to environmental factors (Franklin, Warlaumont, Messinger, Bene, Nathani Iyer, Lee, & Oller, 2014;Oller, Buder, Ramsdell, Warlaumont, Chorna, & Bakeman, 2013), and social feedback loops between parent interactions and babbling are well established (Albert, Schwade, & Goldstein, 2018;Gros-Louis & Miller, 2018;Warlaumont, Richards, Gilkerson, & Oller, 2014), it is unclear whether more sophisticated productions necessarily lead to increased talk to infants: We did not find such links in our data.…”

Statistical Language Learning in Infancy

“…For example, infants’ pointing gestures signal their interest in learning: 19‐month olds can more successfully learn labels for objects they had previously pointed to than for objects they had not pointed to (Lucca & Wilbourn, ). Similarly, infants’ babbling behavior, when directed toward objects, increases caregivers’ contingent responsiveness (Albert, Schwade, & Goldstein, ). These types of findings suggest that infants take an active role in shaping their language learning environment.…”