ArticleDevelopmental science2018
The social functions of babbling: acoustic and contextual characteristics that facilitate maternal responsiveness.
Article in Developmental science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 94 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Maternal behavior influences vocal practice and learning processes in the greater sac-winged bat.eLife · 2025Article
- Conversation Initiation in Families With a Toddler Who Is Deaf or Hard of Hearing.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2025Article
- Sitting and caregiver speech input in typically developing infants and infants with cerebral palsy.PloS one · 2025Article
- Pitch characteristics of real-world infant-directed speech vary with pragmatic context, perceived adult gender, and infant gender.PloS one · 2025Article
- Infant-directed communication: Examining the many dimensions of everyday caregiver-infant interactions.Developmental science · 2024Article
- Social motivation in infancy is associated with familial recurrence of ASD.Development and psychopathology · 2024Article
- Parent American Sign Language skills correlate with child-but not toddler-ASL vocabulary size.Language acquisition · 2024Article
- A Comparison of Maternal and Clinician Perception of Communication in Autistic Toddlers.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2023Article
- Language Experience during Infancy Predicts White Matter Myelination at Age 2 Years.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Vocal communication is tied to interpersonal arousal coupling in caregiver-infant dyads.eLife · 2022Article
- Infants later diagnosed with autism have lower canonical babbling ratios in the first year of life.Molecular autism · 2022Article
- Parent-to-Child Anxiety Transmission Through Dyadic Social Dynamics: A Dynamic Developmental Model.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2022Review
- Evolving the capacity for socially guided vocal learning in songbirds: a preliminary study.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The many functions of vocal learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus.Developmental science · 2021Article
- The ontogeny of human laughter.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Learning in the time of COVID: insights from the zebra finch - a social vocal-learner.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2021Review
- Practice and experience predict coarticulation in child speech.Language learning and development : the official journal of the Society for Language Development · 2021Article
- Relationship Between Parent Vowel Hyperarticulation in Infant-Directed Speech and Infant Phonetic Complexity on the Level of Conversational Turns.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
What is the social function of babbling? An important function of prelinguistic vocalizing may be to elicit parental behavior in ways that facilitate the infant's own learning about speech and language. Infants use parental feedback to their babbling to learn new vocal forms, but the microstructure of parental responses to babbling has not been studied. To enable precise manipulation of the proximal infant cues that may influence maternal behavior, we used a playback paradigm to assess mothers' responsiveness to prerecorded audiovisual clips of unfamiliar infants' noncry prelinguistic vocalizations and actions. Acoustic characteristics and directedness of vocalizations were manipulated to test their efficacy in structuring social interactions. We also compared maternal responsiveness in the playback paradigm and in free play with their own infants. Maternal patterns of reactions to babbling were stable across both tasks. In the playback task, we found specific vocal cues, such as the degree of resonance and the transition timing of consonant-vowel syllables, predicted contingent maternal responding. Vocalizations directed at objects also facilitated increased responsiveness. The responses mothers exhibited, such as sensitive speech and vocal imitation, are known to facilitate vocal learning and development. Infants, by influencing the behavior of their caregivers with their babbling, create social interactions that facilitate their own communicative development.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.