ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Recognizability and timing of infant vocalizations relate to fluctuations in heart rate.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- From data to discovery: Technology propels speech-language research and theory-building in developmental science.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Toward a biologically grounded understanding of autonomic function in developmental science.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2026Review
- An automatic sustained attention prediction (ASAP) method for infants and toddlers using wearable device signals.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Recognizability and timing of infant vocalizations relate to fluctuations in heart rate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
For human infants, producing recognizable speech is more than a cognitive process. It is a motor skill that requires infants to learn to coordinate multiple muscles of varying functions across their body. This coordination is directly linked to ongoing fluctuations in heart rate; a physiological process that can scaffold behavior. We investigated whether ongoing fluctuations in heart rate coincide with vocal production and word formation in 24-mo-old infants. Infants were most likely to produce a vocalization when heart rate fluctuations reached a peak (local maximum) or trough (local minimum). Vocalizations produced at the peak were longer than expected by chance. Functionally, vocalizations produced just before the trough, while heart rate is decelerating, were more likely to be recognized as a word by naive listeners. Thus, for the developing infant, heart rate fluctuations align with the timing of vocal productions and are associated with their duration and the likelihood of producing recognizable speech. Our results have broad and immediate implications for understanding normative language development, the evolutionary basis and physiological process of vocal production, and potential early indicators of speech and communication disorders.
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Registered trials
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