Your turn, my turn. Neural synchrony in mother–infant proto-conversation

Autor(en)

Trinh Nguyen, Lucie Zimmer, Stefanie Hoehl

Abstrakt

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(en)

Institut für Klinische und Gesundheitspsychologie, Institut für Psychologie der Entwicklung und Bildung

Journal

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Band

378

Anzahl der Seiten

1

ISSN

0962-8436

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0488

Publikationsdatum

03-2023

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

501005 Entwicklungspsychologie

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Allgemeine Agrar- und Biowissenschaften, Allgemeine Biochemie, Genetik und Molekularbiologie

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/52ce4d88-cd36-448e-a45f-d5e13c1093d5