Infant babbling simplifies educator language in infant-toddler classrooms.

• In Event: Beyond the Parent-Infant Dyad: How Infants Shape Educators’ Behaviors

Abstract

Background: Sensitive responding to infant behavior is frequently stressed as a competency in educator education programs, but specific emphasis on contingent responses to infant vocalizations is less emphasized. However, the moments following an infant’s vocalizations appear to be a prime time for infant learning. Contingent responses to infant’s pre-linguistic vocalizations have immediate (Goldstein & Schwade, 2008) and long-term impacts on infant language development (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2001). Parents respond with fewer unique words and more single-word utterances in contingent speech than non-contingent speech (Elmlinger et al., 2019), which may serve to scaffold infants’ attention on the most salient speech input. Do infant-toddler classroom educators also simplify their responses to babbling? We compared the rates and complexity of contingent and non-contingent verbal interactions of childcare educators during dyadic infant-educator interactions.
Method and Results: We analyzed video recordings of 34 educator-infant dyads in a five-minute free play session with toys. The sample came from a larger dataset on toddler socio-emotional development (Woldarsky et al., 2019). Infants were 10-15 months at the time of recording (M=12.6 months). Educators’ contingent (utterances within 2 seconds following an infant vocalization) and non-contingent speech (all other speech) was transcribed to calculate the mean length of utterance in words, the number of unique words spoken, and the proportion of single-word utterances (c.f. Elmlinger et al., 2019).Educators’ speech contained a shorter mean length of utterance, a higher proportion of single word utterances, and fewer unique words when responding promptly to infant vocalizations. Thus, infant vocalizations create learning opportunities for infants in childcare settings by eliciting simplified and more learnable linguistic information during educator-infant interactions.
We next investigated whether infant vocalizations elicit different qualities of information in caregiver speech. Caregiver speech was coded into one of six categories: descriptions, questions, affirmations, imitations, play prompts, and explore prompts (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2001). The content of educators’ utterances differed when responding contingently to infant vocalizations. Educators responded with more descriptions (p<.001), play prompts (p<.001), and explore prompts (p=.009) when speaking non-contingently than responding contingently to infant vocalizations. However, when responding to infant vocalizations, educators responded with more affirmations (p<.001) and produced vocal imitations (p<.001). Questions were posed similarly across speech types (p=.926). These demonstrate that infants can use their vocalizations to actively change learning opportunities in childcare classrooms.
Implications: Our results suggest that when educators interact 1-on-1 with infants, they are sensitive to infant vocalizations and alter their contingent speech in ways that make language acquisition easier. This simplification effect should be considered when designing educational opportunities to support language development in early childhood classrooms. Additional research is needed to understand the dynamics of the simplification effect in larger group settings. Altogether, these findings add to a growing body of work demonstrating that infants actively construct their own learning environments in multiple social settings.

Authors

• Rachel R Albert, Lebanon Valley College
  Presenting Author

• Claire D Vallotton, Michigan State University