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This research revealed that the frequency of reported parent-infant singing interactions predicted 6-month-old infants' performance in laboratory music experiments and mediated their language development in the second year. At 6 months, infants (n = 36) were tested using a preferential listening procedure assessing their sustained attention to instrumental and sung versions of the same novel tunes whilst the parents completed an ad-hoc questionnaire assessing home musical interactions with their infants. Language development was assessed with a follow-up when the infants were 14-month-old (n = 26). The main results showed that 6-month-olds preferred listening to sung rather than instrumental melodies, and that self-reported high levels of parental singing with their infants [i] were associated with less pronounced preference for the sung over the instrumental version of the tunes at 6 months, and [ii] predicted significant advantages on the language outcomes in the second year. The results are interpreted in relation to conceptions of developmental plasticity.

This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian-acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children's word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was recorded during a mother-child interaction session and analyzed in terms of amount of speech, lexical and syntactic complexity, positional salience of nouns and verbs, high pitch and variation, and temporal characteristics. The analyses revealed that final syllable length positively predicts children's accuracy in word recognition whereas the use of verbs in the utterance-final position has an adverse effect on children's performance. Several of the expected associations between ID speech features and children's word recognition skills, however, were not significant. Taken together, these findings suggest that only specific structural and acoustic properties of ID speech can facilitate word recognition in children, thereby fostering their ability to extrapolate sound patterns from the stream and map them with their referents.

Background: Many studies have analysed language development in children with Down syndrome to understand better the nature of their linguistic delays and the reason why these delays, particularly those in the morphosyntactic area, seem greater than their cognitive impairment. However, the prosodic characteristics of language development in children with Down syndrome have been scarcely investigated. Aims: To analyse the prosodic skills of children with Down syndrome in the production of multi-word utterances. Data on the prosodic skills of these children were compared with data on typically developing children matched on developmental age and vocabulary size. Between-group differences and the relationships between prosodic and syntactic skills were investigated. Methods & Procedures: The participants were nine children with Down syndrome (who ranged in chronological age from 45 to 63 months and had a mean developmental age of 30 months) and 12 30-month-old typically developing children. The children in both groups had a vocabulary size of approximately 450 words. The children's spontaneous productions were recorded during observations of mother-child play sessions. Outcomes & Results: Data analyses showed that despite their morphosyntactic difficulties, children with Down syndrome were able to master some aspects of prosody in multi-word utterances. They were able to produce single intonation multi-word utterances on the same level as typically developing children. In addition, the intonation contour of their utterances was not negatively influenced by syntactic complexity, contrary to what occurred in typically developing children, although it has to be considered that the utterances produced by children with Down syndrome were less complex than those produced by children in the control group. However, children with Down syndrome appeared to be less able than typically developing children to use intonation to express the pragmatic interrogative function. Conclusions & Implications: The findings are discussed considering the effects of social experience on the utterance prosodic realization.

This research revealed that the frequency of reported parent-infant singing interactions predicted 6-month-old infants' performance in laboratory music experiments and mediated their language development in the second year. At 6 months, infants (n = 36) were tested using a preferential listening procedure assessing their sustained attention to instrumental and sung versions of the same novel tunes whilst the parents completed an ad-hoc questionnaire assessing home musical interactions with their infants. Language development was assessed with a follow-up when the infants were 14-month-old (n = 26). The main results showed that 6-month-olds preferred listening to sung rather than instrumental melodies, and that self-reported high levels of parental singing with their infants [i] were associated with less pronounced preference for the sung over the instrumental version of the tunes at 6 months, and [ii] predicted significant advantages on the language outcomes in the second year. The results are interpreted in relation to conceptions of developmental plasticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is the particular voice register observed in the majority of parents in interaction with their infants and differs from natural speech used in conversations with adults by showing exaggerated prosodic features. These prosodic features are supposed to have effects on regulating infant arousal and attention, fostering infant pre-linguistic and linguistic competences and enhancing the expression of positive affect. The present set of meta-analyses was conducted to test these associations and the role of moderators during the first two years of infant life. The results confirmed an overall association between IDS prosody and infant outcomes with prosodic values typical of IDS associated with better outcomes. This association was confirmed for attentional, pre-linguistic and linguistic outcomes with a greater effect on pre-linguistic than linguistic outcomes. An insufficient number of studies was found to test the association with infant emotion expression. Many limitations in the existing body of literature were found, such as a lack of empirical papers exploring IDS prosody in relation to infant outcomes using natural observations. The results and limitations were discussed in light of the necessity to examine the interplay between the quality of IDS prosody and other aspects of parental communicative and caregiving competences. To do so, the contribution of scholars from different fields is needed with the aim to fully understand the multidimensional determinants and influential mechanisms of IDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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