Mechthild Papoušek

Infant responses to prototypical melodic contours in parental speech

Abstract Visual behavior in 4-month-olds was influenced by melodic patterns prototypic of “naturally approving” and “naturally disapproving” infant-directed speech, independent of linguistic and other contextual information. Approving contours elevated infant looking as compared to disapproving and control contours; disapproving contours inhibited infant looking. The data suggest that individual melodic prototypes may function as didactic caregiving messages for infants.

Tone and Intonation in Mandarin Babytalk to Presyllabic Infants: Comparison with Registers of Adult Conversation and Foreign Language Instruction.

Six native speakers of Mandarin Chinese recorded 140 preselected utterances in three role-play contexts that differentially elicited registers of babytalk to presyllabic infants (BTP), foreign language instruction (FLI), and adult conversation (AC). Sound spectrograms were used to obtain 10 measures of fundamental frequency (Fo) patterns for comparisons among the three registers. In FLI, the speakers expanded Fo patterns in time and Fo range in comparison with AC. They clarified lexical tonal information and seemed to reduce suprasegmental information. In BTP, the speakers raised peak and minimum Fo, reduced the rate of Fo fluctuations, and increased the proportion of terminal rising contours. The speakers reduced, neglected, or modified lexical tonal information in favor of simplified and clarified intonation contours. The significance of the results is discussed in relation to tone acquisition in children and to a universal intuitive didactic competence in caretakers.

Excessive infant crying and intuitive parental care:Buffering support and its failure in parent-infant interaction

Behavioral microanalyses of early parent‐infant communication have revealed nonconscious adaptive behaviors in the parent which function as effective soothing interventions and may prevent excessive infant crying. Elicited by the infants subtle non‐cry signals, parental nonconscious interventions facilitate the infants postpartum physiological, affective, and integrative adaptation, and support non‐cry communication and speech acquisition. Reciprocal interrelations between factors of infant crying and intuitive forms of parental interventions are represented in a psychobiological interactional model predicting twofold outcomes. In one direction, parental interventions may function as a protective buffer which mitigates the effects of factors causing irritability, unexplained fussiness, and abnormal crying in infants until compensatory improvements are gradually achieved. In the other direction, intuitive parental caregiving may fail due to primary unfavorable predispositions and#shor secondarily due to ...

Structure and dynamics of human communication at the beginning of life

SummaryAlthough the beginning of postpartum social integration and communication has been long viewed as relevant to psychiatric theories, early parent-infant communication has become a matter of scientific investigation only recently. The present survey explains the significance of an approach based upon the general systems theory and explores to what extent the early parent-infant interaction can function as a didactic system to support the development of thought and speech. Evidence of this function has been found in those forms of parental behavior that escape the parents conscious awareness and control, as exemplified in the vocal communication with presyllabic infants. Parents unknowingly adjust the structure and dynamics of speech to the constraints of infant capacities, detach prosodic musicality from lexical structure, and use it in particularly expressive forms for the delivery of the first prototypical messages. In this and other similar ways, parents offer an abundance of learning situations in which infants can try out various integrative operations.A biological rather than cultural provenience of the support of communicative development indicates a potential relevance for the interpretation of speech evolution. In addition to qualities of the vocal tract and to complex symbolic capacities in humans, the early intuitive support of communicative development and its playful character are suggested as species-specific determinants of speech evolution. Implications for clinical research are suggested.

Stimmliche Kommunikation im frühen Säuglingsalter als Wegbereiter der Sprachentwicklung

Keine der naturlichen Muttersprachen der Welt kann so schwierig sein, das sie sich nicht ein Saugling offenbar muhelos aneignen konnte.

The Psychobiology of the First Didactic Programs and Toys in Human Infants

As a guest to the Comenius Society and like Comenius as a man born in Moravia, I wish to take the liberty of recalling some of his ideas and using them as departure points for our presentation at this symposium.

Beginning of Human Musicality

In relation to the regulation of human behavior, natural selection has favored perception and processing of sounds and visible events to a degree at which their combinations allow not only a perfect ecological adjustment, but also a development of complex forms of communication and culture; thus, biological adaptation improved far beyond the limits observable in other mammals, primates included. Moreover, humans have become capable of creating a mental representation of their environment and course of life. In this internal world, humans can integrate life experience according to new, for instance, moral or hedonic, principles and can attribute new meanings to environmental events. Consequently, sounds coming from enviroment may be perceived and appraised — with a considerable individual variability — as pleasant, harmonious, or melodious, or disagreeable, wild, etc., although physical criteria for similar attributions may be problematic. Hence, musicality — whether in terms of sound qualities, or in terms of the listener’s sensitivity to, knowledge of, and talent for music — may also be difficult to evaluate with physical measurements.

Early Integration of Experience

No matter how sweet a human baby may be, it does not create the initial impression of being an ideal subject for studies concerning the major questions of the humanistic sciences. Babies are not easily instructed as to appropriate cooperation in the laboratory, they are unable to fill out questionnaires or open their minds to sophisticated interviewers, and they seem to enjoy surprising even the most passionate experimenters with unexpected developmental outcomes. Rather typically, they urinate at the least convenient moments of experimental investigations, or cause investigations to be terminated when they become (or pretend to have become) hungry. When the experimenter learns from parents about effective strategies for soothing crying babies such as driving them around the block in the car, or putting them on a running and pleasantly vibrating washing machine, he quickly realizes how onesided our usual attempts are to study the effects of social stimulation on infant development. Simply put, babies are neither miniatures of adults, nor as helpless as they may seem to be. Yet they are unique in their own ways while passing through this particular period of life, and although they may seem to be inadequate as research subjects, they do nevertheless raise some major questions: Are their behaviours inherited or learned? Do they have minds? Do they understand us? How do they acquire language? Are they cultural beings?