Su Pumpki Lei, Ramsay Gordon, Bene Edina R, Yoo Hyunjoo, Long Helen L, Klaiman Cheryl, Pulver Stormi L, Richardson Shana, Pileggi Moira L, Brane Natalie, Oller D Kimbrough
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas, USA.
Callier Center for Communication Disorders, The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, Texas, USA.
Infancy. 2025 May-Jun;30(3):e70022. doi: 10.1111/infa.70022.
Caregivers across many cultures modify their speech when interacting with infants or young children. This type of speech, commonly known as "parentese", is characterized by greater pitch variations, longer duration, and louder volume compared to speech directed to adults. Parentese has been found to facilitate language learning. It has been proposed that parentese may benefit early language development because its exaggerated prosody encourages infants to interact with caregivers. We tested this hypothesis by investigating if parentese temporally elicits infant speech-like vocalization in typically developing (TD) and in autistic infants using sequential analysis. We compared caregiver-child vocal contingencies coded from 847 days-long recordings of 103 TD infants and 44 infants with a confirmed diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at 3 years. Findings revealed that infants were more likely to produce a speech-like vocalization following an adult utterance directed to them in parentese compared to an adult utterance directed to them in adult register. Additionally, the strength of the sequential association between parentese or adult register and infant speech-like vocalization did not differ across diagnostic groups. These findings support the notion that parentese may facilitate language learning via encouraging infants to respond and interact with their conversation partner.
在许多文化中，照顾者在与婴幼儿互动时会调整他们的言语。这种言语类型通常被称为“父母语”，其特点是与对成年人说话相比，音高变化更大、持续时间更长、音量更大。研究发现，父母语有助于语言学习。有人提出，父母语可能有益于早期语言发展，因为其夸张的韵律鼓励婴儿与照顾者互动。我们通过使用序列分析研究父母语是否能在发育正常（TD）的婴儿和自闭症婴儿中暂时引发类似婴儿言语的发声，来检验这一假设。我们比较了从103名TD婴儿和44名确诊为自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的3岁婴儿的847天时长的录音中编码的照顾者-儿童发声偶联情况。研究结果显示，与以成人语域对他们说话相比，婴儿在听到以父母语对他们说的话语之后更有可能发出类似言语的发声。此外，父母语或成人语域与婴儿类似言语发声之间的序列关联强度在不同诊断组之间没有差异。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即父母语可能通过鼓励婴儿回应并与他们的对话伙伴互动来促进语言学习。
