Your turn, my turn. Neural synchrony in mother–infant proto-conversation
- Author(s)
- Trinh Nguyen, Lucie Zimmer, Stefanie Hoehl
- Abstract
Even before infants utter their first words, they engage in highly coordinated vocal exchanges with their caregivers. During these so-called proto-conversations, caregiver-infant dyads use a presumably universal communication structure-turn-taking, which has been linked to favourable developmental outcomes. However, little is known about potential mechanisms involved in early turn-taking. Previous research pointed to interpersonal synchronization of brain activity between adults and preschool-aged children during turn-taking. Here, we assessed caregivers and infants at 4-6 months of age (N = 55) during a face-to-face interaction. We used functional-near infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning to measure dyads' brain activity and microcoded their turn-taking. We also measured infants' inter-hemispheric connectivity as an index for brain maturity and later vocabulary size and attachment security as developmental outcomes potentially linked to turn-taking. The results showed that more frequent turn-taking was related to interpersonal neural synchrony, but the strength of the relation decreased over the course of the proto-conversation. Importantly, turn-taking was positively associated with infant brain maturity and later vocabulary size, but not with later attachment security. Taken together, these findings shed light on mechanisms facilitating preverbal turn-taking and stress the importance of emerging turn-taking for child brain and language development. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Face2face: advancing the science of social interaction'.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Journal
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Volume
- 378
- No. of pages
- 1
- ISSN
- 0962-8436
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0488
- Publication date
- 03-2023
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 501005 Developmental psychology
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all), Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all)
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/your-turn-my-turn-neural-synchrony-in-motherinfant-protoconversation(52ce4d88-cd36-448e-a45f-d5e13c1093d5).html