Individual Differences in Infants' Speech Segmentation Performance: The Role of Mother-Infant Cardiac Synchrony

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

  • Monica Vanoncini
  • Ezgi Kayhan
  • Birgit Elsner
  • Moritz Wunderwald
  • Sebastian Wallot
  • Stefanie Hoehl
  • Natalie Boll-Avetisyan

Caregiver-infant coregulation is an early form of communication. This study investigated whether mother-infant biological coregulation is associated with 9-month-olds’ word segmentation performance, a crucial milestone predicting language development. We hypothesized that coregulation would relate with infants' word segmentation performance. Additionally, we examined whether this relationship is influenced by the caregiving environment (i.e., parental reflective functioning) and the infant's emotional state (i.e., positive affect). Coregulation was investigated via cardiac synchrony in 28 nine-month-old infants (16 females) during a 5-min free-play with their German-speaking mothers. Cardiac synchrony was measured through Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), employing Recurrence Quantification Analysis to evaluate dyadic coupling (i.e., Recurrence Rate) and dyadic predictability (i.e., Entropy). Infants' word segmentation was measured with an eye-tracking central-fixation procedure. A stepwise regression revealed that higher dyadic coupling, but not predictability, of the dyads' RSA was associated with infants looking longer toward the screen when listening to novel as compared to familiar test words, indicating advanced word segmentation performance (Cohen's d = 0.25). Moreover, cardiac synchrony correlated positively with maternal sensitivity to their infant's mental states, but not with the infant's positive affect. These results suggest that caregiver-infant biological coregulation may play a foundational role in language acquisition.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere70020
JournalInfancy
Volume30
Issue number2
Number of pages13
ISSN1525-0008
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.03.2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 The Author(s). Infancy published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Congress of Infant Studies.

    Research areas

  • cardiac synchrony, infant word segmentation, mother-child interactions, recurrence quantification analysis, respiratory sinus arrhythmia
  • Psychology

DOI