ABSTRACT
There are many theories surrounding infant imitation; however, there is no research to our knowledge evaluating the reliability of listener perception of vocal imitation in prelinguistic infants. This paper evaluates intra- and inter-rater judgments on the degree of "imitativeness" in utterances of infants below 12 months of age. 18 listeners were presented audio segments selected from naturalistic recordings to represent in each case a parent vocal model followed by an infant utterance ranging from low to high degrees of imitativeness. The naturalistic data suggested vocal imitation occurred rarely across the first year, but strong intra- and inter-rater correlations were found for judgments of imitativeness. Our results suggest salience of the infant's vocal imitation despite its rare occurrence as well as active perception by listeners of the imitative signal. We discuss infant vocal imitation as a potential signal of well-being as perceived by caregivers.
ABSTRACT
Turn-taking is a universal and fundamental feature of human vocal communication. Through protoconversation, caregivers play a key role for infants in helping them learn the turn-taking system. Infants produce both speech-like vocalizations (i.e., protophones) and cries from birth. Prior research has shown that caregivers take turns with infant protophones. However, no prior research has investigated the timing of caregiver responses to cries. The present work is the first to systematically investigate different temporal patterns of caregiver responses to protophones and to cries. Results showed that, even in infants' first 3 months of life, caregivers were more likely to take turns with protophones and to overlap with cries. The study provides evidence that caregivers are intuitively aware that protophones and cries are functionally different: protophones are treated as precursors to speech, whereas cries are treated as expressions of distress.
