Fluctuations in Maternal Speech Prosody and Preschool-Aged Children’s Behavioral and Physiological Regulation During a Challenge

• In Event: 1-064 - Emotion in the Voice: Leveraging Automated Assessment to Study Communication and Regulation in Early Childhood

Integrative Statement

Young children's ability to regulate physiological arousal, behavior and affect in response to challenge is shaped partly by supportive caregiving. The specific sensory mechanisms, however, through which caregiving promotes child regulation, are not well specified. To this end, we investigated a novel feature of maternal behavior – speech prosody, which is defined as the rhythm and intonation of speech and which may convey emotionally salient information. Drawing upon theory and evidence from psychophysiology, linguistics, and speech sciences, we posited that momentary fluctuations in maternal speech prosody would be related to emotion-related maternal behaviors, as well as momentary fluctuations in children’s parasympathetic activity (i.e., cardiac vagal suppression or augmentation), behavior, and affect.

Children (N = 130, Mage = 4.4 years, SD = .66) and their mothers were observed in two 5-min challenging puzzles tasks. Mothers received the puzzle solutions and were restricted to providing verbal help. Dyads were observed in two conditions (counterbalanced): low barrier (mother and child could see each other, but mother could not see the child’s puzzle) and high barrier (mother and child could not see each other). Prosody, behavioral, and cardiac data during the tasks were assessed in time-synchronized 15-second intervals. Maternal prosody was captured via a composite of acoustic measurements (i.e., fundamental frequency mean, max, range, and standard deviation) extracted from the speech signal via automated methods. Maternal (emotional support, positive affect, cognitive assistance) and child (attention/persistence, frustration/withdrawal, positive affect) behaviors were manually rated on 4-point scales. Children’s heart-rate variability was measured via a 3-lead wireless ECG to capture cardiac vagal tone.

A series of multilevel models revealed contemporaneous associations between maternal prosody and maternal behavior (see Table 1): Higher prosody in a given 15-sec interval (relative to one’s own mean) predicted mothers’ higher-than-average emotional support and positive affect and lower-than-average cognitive assistance in the same interval. Controlling for maternal behavior and affect, within-person increases in maternal prosody contemporaneously predicted children’s vagal augmentation (high barrier only; B = .09, SE = .036, p = .014), as well as decreased task attention/persistence, increased frustration/withdrawal (low barrier only), and increased positive affect (see Table 2).

Our findings suggest that momentary increases in maternal speech prosody are associated with related changes in emotionally salient parenting (e.g., comforting), whereas decreases in prosody are associated with increases in cognitively relevant behaviors (e.g., teaching). Likewise, above and beyond observed maternal behavior, momentary increases in maternal prosody were associated with contemporaneous increases in cardiac vagal tone (i.e. vagal augmentation) and positive and negative dimensions of child affect, but decreases in child task-related attention. Maternal emotional prosody may serve a unique function to socially orient the child toward the mother and may also be a central component of the maternal response to child’s affective cues. Such moment-to-moment coupling between maternal prosody, on the one hand, and child affect and physiology, on the other, may underlie dyadic co-regulatory processes. Findings will be discussed with respect to the contributions of such dynamic dyadic processes to children’s regulatory and behavioral functioning on larger time scales.

Authors

• Nancy McElwain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Dan Berry, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer Cole, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Niyantri Ravindran, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author