Individual Differences in Infants' Speech Segmentation Performance
- Author(s)
- Monica Vanoncini, Ezgi Kayhan, Birgit Elsner, Moritz Wunderwald, Sebastian Wallot, Stefanie Hoehl, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan
- Abstract
Caregiver-infant coregulation is an early form of communication. This study investigated whether mother-infant biological coregulation is associated with 9-month-olds’ word segmentation performance, a crucial milestone predicting language development. We hypothesized that coregulation would relate with infants' word segmentation performance. Additionally, we examined whether this relationship is influenced by the caregiving environment (i.e., parental reflective functioning) and the infant's emotional state (i.e., positive affect). Coregulation was investigated via cardiac synchrony in 28 nine-month-old infants (16 females) during a 5-min free-play with their German-speaking mothers. Cardiac synchrony was measured through Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), employing Recurrence Quantification Analysis to evaluate dyadic coupling (i.e., Recurrence Rate) and dyadic predictability (i.e., Entropy). Infants' word segmentation was measured with an eye-tracking central-fixation procedure. A stepwise regression revealed that higher dyadic coupling, but not predictability, of the dyads' RSA was associated with infants looking longer toward the screen when listening to novel as compared to familiar test words, indicating advanced word segmentation performance (Cohen's d = 0.25). Moreover, cardiac synchrony correlated positively with maternal sensitivity to their infant's mental states, but not with the infant's positive affect. These results suggest that caregiver-infant biological coregulation may play a foundational role in language acquisition.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Department of Clinical and Health Psychology
- External organisation(s)
- Universität Potsdam, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Max-Planck-Institut für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
- Journal
- Infancy
- Volume
- 30
- ISSN
- 1525-0008
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.70020
- Publication date
- 03-2025
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 501005 Developmental psychology
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Pediatrics, Perinatology, and Child Health, Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/659cee2d-7bb8-4883-90c4-1d990887dc3f