Distinguishing infant-directed speech and songs: The distinctive evolution of acoustic features and visual entrainment in infants

Given the immature cognitive abilities of infants at birth, caregivers connect with them by producing stereotyped infant-directed (ID) forms of speech and songs in which the acoustic features are modified.

Although ID vocalisations are fundamental for establishing social and affective bonds, key aspects of infantcaregiver interactions are still poorly understood.

One of the goals of the Musical Speech project is to identify distinctive acoustic adaptations of ID speech and songs by implementing machine learning models to cross-culture recordings from diverse societies, and track the evolution of those acoustic markers over the first year of life.

In addition, recent evidence shows that the rhythm of ID singing acts as an effective cue for infants to attend to emotionally and socially-relevant content, such that infants look more to the caregivers eyes during on-beat moments of the songs.

This project aims to determine whether rhythm in ID speaking similarly attunes infants attention and whether ID speech elicits distinctive patterns of attention before and after 6 months (as it serves more of a linguistic purpose).

Using audiovisual recordings of adults speaking/singing to infants, this project will implement cutting-edge eye-tracking measures to samples of Canadian and Spanish infants.

Finally, prematurity and individual differences in neural coding of rhythm, measured with a state-of-the-art EEG paradigm, can affect early interactions.

Thus, the eye-tracking outcomes of terms and an additional sample of preterms will be correlated with the EEG signal elicited by rhythmic stimuli.

The cross-laboratory studies proposed in this innovative project will comprise training on advanced statistical techniques and leadership, as they rely on the coordination of an international network.

The project can contribute to basic and applied fields with unprecedented, high-quality insights and an experimental paradigm shift to compare early language and music perception.