Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Potsdam, Germany; Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Germany; Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria.
Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Germany.
Infant Behav Dev. 2022 Nov;69:101772. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101772. Epub 2022 Sep 19.
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.
韵律性既体现在人际同步中，也体现在口语中。情感和语言是人际交流的两种形式，它们在整个发展过程中相互作用。我们研究了母亲和 9 个月大的婴儿之间的情绪同步是否以及如何与婴儿的词语分割有关，词语分割是语言发展的早期标志。26 名 9 个月大的婴儿及其德语母语的母亲参与了这项研究。为了测量情绪同步性，我们在自由游戏期间对母亲和婴儿的积极、中性和消极情绪表达进行了编码。然后，我们计算了母亲和婴儿的匹配情绪表达遵循可预测模式的程度。为了测量词语分割，我们让婴儿熟悉听觉文本段落，并测试他们在听熟悉和陌生单词时注视屏幕的时间。我们发现，母婴互动中更高的可预测性水平（即低熵）与婴儿的词语分割表现相关。这些发现表明，词语分割的个体差异与母婴互动中情绪表达的复杂性和可预测性有关。
