Exploratory dynamics of vocal foraging during infant-caregiver communication

We investigated the hypothesis that infants search in an acoustic space for vocalisations that elicit adult utterances and vice versa, inspired by research on animal and human foraging. Infant-worn recorders were used to collect day-long audio recordings, and infant speech-related and adult vocalisa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2020-06, Vol.10 (1), p.10469-10469, Article 10469
Main Authors: Ritwika, V. P. S., Pretzer, Gina M., Mendoza, Sara, Shedd, Christopher, Kello, Christopher T., Gopinathan, Ajay, Warlaumont, Anne S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/378/3919
631/477/2811
Acoustics
Adult
Animals
Babies
Caregivers
Communication
Female
Frequency
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Hypotheses
Infant
Infant Behavior - physiology
Infants
Labeling
Male
multidisciplinary
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Speech - physiology
Vocalization behavior
Vocalization, Animal - physiology
Voice - physiology
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Summary:We investigated the hypothesis that infants search in an acoustic space for vocalisations that elicit adult utterances and vice versa, inspired by research on animal and human foraging. Infant-worn recorders were used to collect day-long audio recordings, and infant speech-related and adult vocalisation onsets and offsets were automatically identified. We examined vocalisation-to-vocalisation steps, focusing on inter-vocalisation time intervals and distances in an acoustic space defined by mean pitch and mean amplitude, measured from the child’s perspective. Infant inter-vocalisation intervals were shorter immediately following a vocal response from an adult. Adult intervals were shorter following an infant response and adult inter-vocalisation pitch differences were smaller following the receipt of a vocal response from the infant. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that infants and caregivers are foraging vocally for social input. Increasing infant age was associated with changes in inter-vocalisation step sizes for both infants and adults, and we found associations between response likelihood and acoustic characteristics. Future work is needed to determine the impact of different labelling methods and of automatic labelling errors on the results. The study represents a novel application of foraging theory, demonstrating how infant behaviour and infant-caregiver interaction can be characterised as foraging processes.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-020-66778-0