Query: parent infent babbling

title: Parents' contingent responses in communication with 10 month old children in a clinical group with typical or late babbling
abstract: Parental responsive behaviour in communication has a positive effect on child speech and language development. Absence of canonical babbling (CB) in 10 month old infants is considered a risk factor for developmental difficulties, yet little is known about parental responsiveness in this group of children. The purpose of the current study was to examine proportion and type of parental responsive utterances after CB and vocalization utterances respectively in a clinical group of children with otitis media with effusion, with or without cleft palate. Audio video recordings of interactions in free play situations with 22 parents and their 10 month old infants were used, where 15 infants had reached the CB stage and 7 infants had not. Fifty consecutive child utterances were annotated and categorized as vocalization utterance or CB utterance. The parent's following contingent response was annotated and labelled as acknowledgements, follow in comments, imitations/expansions or directives. The Average intra judge agreement was 90% and the average inter judger agreement was 84% There was no significant difference in proportion contingent responses after vocalizations and CB, neither when considering all child utterances nor the child's babbling stage. However, imitations/expansions tended to be more common after CB in the typical babbling group, whereas acknowledgements were more common after CB in the late babbling group. Our findings imply that responsiveness is a supportive strategy that is not fully used by parents of children with late babbling. Implications for further research as well as parent directed intervention for children in clinical groups with late babbling are suggested.

title: Babbling and consonant production in children with hearing impairment who use hearing aids or cochlear implants a pilot study
abstract: To investigate early auditory prerequisites in relation to the use of canonical babbling (CB) and early consonant production in a heterogeneous group of children with hearing impairment (HI) and in comparison to controls with normal hearing (NH)  Five children with unilateral or bilateral HI who used hearing aids (HA) (0;9 1;7 years) and six children with cochlear implants (CI) (0;10 2;0 years) were compared to data from 22 children with NH (0;10 1;6 years) Hearing age, type of HI and daily use of hearing technology (hours) was investigated in relation to CB ratio and consonant production. Analysis of babbling from video recordings during verbal interaction between a parent and child was independently performed by two observers. Intra and inter agreement were calculated.  Children with HI used less CB compared to children with NH. Less CB utterances and occurrences of dental/alveolar stops were found in children with HA who had a hearing age of 5 months and who used their hearing technology 5 h per day. The children with CI reached an expected CB ratio and consonant production after 8.5 months with daily fulltime use of CI.  Even a mild hearing loss in early childhood may affect and delay the onset of important linguistic milestones like canonical babbling and consonant production. It was indicated that children with CI or HA might receive different attention and intervention services. Longer hearing age and full time use of hearing technology may influence positively on CB ratio and consonant production in children with HI.

title: The emergence of conversational turns as a function of parent coaching on language
abstract: Previous research shows that parents' use of parentese, a nearly universal speaking style distinguished by higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation contours, is associated with advances in children's language learning. We recently showed that when parents are "coached" about the use of parentese when their infants are 6 and 10 months of age, they increase their use of parentese in child directed speech, which has an immediate and positive effect on child babbling at 14 months. The present longitudinal follow up study illuminates the mechanisms by which parentese enhanced children's language growth in families who received parent coaching on the use of parentese. We demonstrate that, by 18 months of age, coached parents and their infants (n 55) engaged in significantly more conversational turns compared to uncoached parents and infants (n 24) p 0.01, as measured by first person LENA recordings in families' homes. Furthermore, infants of coached parents showed enhanced language outcome.

title: The perception of intention and emotion in non cry pre babbling infant vocalizations
abstract: From the sixth week of life infants start to produce non distress vocalizations during social exchange, and adults interpret these as communicative expressions. The prosodic qualities of these early vocalizations have not been extensively studied. The aim of this study was to examine some of the factors which lead "naive" adult listeners to perceive infant vocalization as intentional on the one hand and as expressing emotion on the other hand. A sample of 24 non distress vocalizations produced in the course of social interaction with a parent was selected for this study. Half of the vocalizations were produced by 6 week old infants, and half by 18 week old. The sample was also evenly distributed according to two other factors, duration (short vs. long) and continuity (continuous vs. discontinuous) Pairs of vocalizations were created by varying only one of the 3 factors (age, duration, continuity) at a time. A hundred and ten participants heard a total of 48 pairs of vocalizations presented in counterbalanced trials and were asked to determine which vocalization was more communicative and, on a separate occasion, which expressed greater emotion. Binary response choice was recorded for each stimulus and for each participant. Results show that listeners use different strategies in attributing communicative intent and emotional intensity. It also appeared that older infants' vocalizations were generally perceived as more communicative whereas longer vocalizations were perceived to convey more emotion

title: The ecology of prelinguistic vocal learning: parents simplify the structure of their speech in response to babbling
abstract: What is the function of babbling in language learning? We examined the structure of parental speech as a function of contingency on infants' non cry prelinguistic vocalizations. We analyzed several acoustic and linguistic measures of caregivers' speech. Contingent speech was less lexically diverse and shorter in utterance length than non contingent speech. We also found that the lexical diversity of contingent parental speech only predicted infant vocal maturity. These findings illustrate a new form of influence infants have over their ambient language in everyday learning environments. By vocalizing, infants catalyze the production of simplified, more easily learnable language from caregivers.

title: Babbling elicits simplified caregiver speech: Findings from natural interaction and simulation
abstract: What is the function of babbling in language learning? Our recent findings suggest that infants' immature vocalizations may elicit simplified linguistic responses from their caregivers. The contributions of parental speech to infant development are well established; individual differences in the number of words in infants' ambient language environment predict communicative and cognitive development. It is unclear whether the number or the diversity of words in infants' environments is more critical for understanding infant language development. We present a new solution that observes the relation between the total number of words (tokens) and the diversity of words in infants' environments. Comparing speech corpora containing different numbers of tokens is challenging because the number of tokens strongly influences measures of corpus word diversity. However, here we offer a method for minimizing the effects of corpus size by deriving control samples of words and comparing them to test samples. We find that parents' speech in response to infants' babbling is simpler in that it contains fewer word types; our estimates based on sampling also suggest simplification of word diversity with larger numbers of tokens. Thus, infants, via their immature vocalizations, elicit speech from caregivers that is easier to learn.

title: Babbling in children with neurodevelopmental disability and validity of a simplified way of measuring canonical babbling ratio
abstract: Babbling is an important precursor to speech, but has not yet been thoroughly investigated in children with neurodevelopmental disabilities. Canonical babbling ratio (CBR) is a commonly used but time consuming measure for quantifying babbling. The aim of this study was twofold: to validate a simplified version of the CBR (CBRUTTER) and to use this measure to determine if early precursors to speech and language development could be detected in children with different neurodevelopmental disabilities. Two different data sets were used. In Part I, CBRUTTER was compared to two other CBR measures using previously obtained phonetic transcriptions of 3571 utterances from 38 audio recordings of 12 18 month old children with and without cleft palate. In CBRUTTER, number of canonical utterances was divided by total number of utterances. In CBRsyl, number of canonical syllables was divided by total number of syllables. In CBRutt, number of canonical syllables was divided by total number of utterances. High agreement was seen between CBRUTTER and CBRsyl, suggesting CBRUTTER as an alternative. In Part II, babbling in children with neurodevelopmental disability was examined. Eighteen children aged 12 22 months with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy or developmental delay were audio video recorded during interaction with a parent. Recordings were analysed by observation of babbling, consonant production, calculation of CBRUTTER, and compared to data from controls. The study group showed significantly lower occurrence of all variables, except for of plosives. The long term relevance of the findings for the speech and language development of the children needs to be investigated.

title: Parent coaching at 6 and 10 months improves language outcomes at 14 months: A randomized controlled trial.
abstract: Previous studies reveal an association between particular features of parental language input and advances in children's language learning. However, it is not known whether parent coaching aimed to enhance specific input components would (a) successfully increase these components in parents' language input and (b) result in concurrent increases in children's language development. The present randomized controlled trial assigned families of typically developing 6 month old infants to Intervention (parent coaching) and Control (no coaching) groups. Families were equivalent on socioeconomic status, infants' gender, and infants' age. Parent coaching took place when infants were 6 and 10 months of age, and included quantitative and qualitative linguistic feedback on the amount of child directed speech, back and forth interactions, and parentese speech style. These variables were derived from each family's first person LENA recordings at home. Input variables and infant language were measured at 6, 10, and 14 months. Parent coaching significantly enhanced language input as measured by two social interaction variables: percentage of speech directed to the child and percentage of parentese speech. These two variables were correlated, and were both related to growth in infant babbling between 6 and 14 months. Intervention infants showed greater growth in babbling than Control infants. Furthermore, at 14 months, Intervention infants produced significantly more words than Control infants, as indicated by LENA recordings and parent report via the MacArthur Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory. Together, these results indicate that parent coaching can enrich specific aspects of parental language input, and can immediately and positively impact child language outcomes. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https:/youtu.be/7wqR28gPiwo.

title: Insertion of pause in drawing from babbling for robot's developmental imitation learning
abstract: In this paper, we present a method to improve a robot's imitation performance in a drawing scenario by inserting pauses in motion. Human's drawing skills are said to develop through five stages: 1) Scribbling, 2) Fortuitous Realism, 3) Failed Realism, 4) Intellectual Realism, and 5) Visual Realism. We focus on stages 1) and 3) for creating our system, each corresponding to body babbling and imitation learning, respectively. For stage 1) the robot randomly moves its arm to associate robot's arm dynamics with the drawing result. Presuming that the robot has no knowledge about its own dynamics, the robot learns its body dynamics in this stage. For stage 3) we consider a scenario where a robot would imitate a human's drawing motion. Upon creating the system, we focus on the motionese phenomenon, which is one of the key factors for discussing acquisition of a skill through a human parent child interaction. In motionese, the parent would first show each action elaborately to the child, when teaching a skill. As the child starts to improve, the parent's actions would be simplified. Likewise in our scenario, the human would first insert pauses during the drawing motions where the direction of drawing changes (i.e. corners) As the robot's imitation learning of drawing converges, the human would change to drawing without pauses. The experimental results show that insertion of pause in drawing imitation scenarios greatly improves the robot's drawing performance.

title: Effectiveness of the Corrective Babbling Speech Treatment Program for Children with a History of Cleft Palate or Velopharyngeal Dysfunction
abstract: To investigate the effectiveness of a phonetic based, parent administered treatment to reduce cleft related speech errors.  Immediate treatment (IT) versus delayed treatment (DT) comparison followed by analysis of gains over approximately 4 months and again after a longer period of treatment for participants in both groups.  Thirteen participants with a history of cleft palate or velopharyngeal dysfunction and speech disorder.  After training, parents were instructed to conduct daily 10 minute sessions of phonetic drills with their children. Main Outcome Measures Group differences in percent consonants correct (PCC) were compared between those who did and those who did not receive the treatment. Pre and posttreatment PCC comparisons were made after approximately 4 months of treatment and after termination of treatment.  Participants receiving Corrective Babbling therapy showed significant gains in PCC in limited contexts after 4 months of therapy. However, gains were not significantly greater for the IT versus DT group. Participants who continued with the treatment for longer than 4 months showed the greatest gains in PCC and had significant improvements in all speech contexts assessed. Parents reported satisfaction with the program.  The results of this study indicate that this treatment shows promise for at least some children with a history of cleft palate and velopharyngeal dysfunction.