The role of mother-infant emotional synchrony in speech processing in 9-month-old infants

Author(s)
Monica Vanoncini, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan, Birgit Elsner, Stefanie Hoehl, Ezgi Kayhan
Abstract

Rhythmicity characterizes both interpersonal synchrony and spoken language. Emotions and language are forms of interpersonal communication, which interact with each other throughout development. We investigated whether and how emotional synchrony between mothers and their 9-month-old infants relates to infants' word segmentation as an early marker of language development. Twenty-six 9-month-old infants and their German-speaking mothers took part in the study. To measure emotional synchrony, we coded positive, neutral and negative emotional expressions of the mothers and their infants during a free play session. We then calculated the degree to which the mothers' and their infants' matching emotional expressions followed a predictable pattern. To measure word segmentation, we familiarized infants with auditory text passages and tested how long they looked at the screen while listening to familiar versus novel words. We found that higher levels of predictability (i.e. low entropy) during mother-infant interaction is associated with infants' word segmentation performance. These findings suggest that individual differences in word segmentation relate to the complexity and predictability of emotional expressions during mother-infant interactions.

Organisation(s)
Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology
External organisation(s)
Universität Potsdam
Journal
Infant Behavior and Development
Volume
69
No. of pages
13
ISSN
0163-6383
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101772
Publication date
09-2022
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
501005 Developmental psychology
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/the-role-of-motherinfant-emotional-synchrony-in-speech-processing-in-9monthold-infants(6c25e0ec-e39c-408a-ae24-0b92fad90ec3).html