Infant-directed speech drives social preferences in 5-month-old infants.

Adults across cultures speak to infants in a specific infant-directed manner. We asked whether infants use this manner of speech (infant- or adult-directed) to guide their subsequent visual preferences for social partners. We found that 5-month-old infants encode an individuals' use of infant-directed speech and adult-directed speech, and use this information to guide their subsequent visual preferences for individuals even after the speech behavior has ended. Use of infant-directed speech may act as an effective cue for infants to select appropriate social partners, allowing infants to focus their attention on individuals who will provide optimal care and opportunity for learning. This selectivity may play a crucial role in establishing the foundations of social cognition.

[1]  D. Stern,et al.  The prosody of maternal speech: infant age and context related changes , 1983, Journal of Child Language.

[2]  R. Frick.  Communicating emotion: The role of prosodic features. , 1985 .

[3]  A. Fernald.  Four-Month-Old Infants Prefer to Listen to Motherese" , 1985 .

[4]  P. Kuhl,et al.  Acoustic determinants of infant preference for motherese speech , 1987 .

[5]  Lori A. Roggman,et al.  Infant preferences for attractive faces: Rudiments of a stereotype? , 1987 .

[6]  J. Werker,et al.  Infant preference for both male and female infant-directed talk: a developmental study of attentional and affective responsiveness. , 1989, Canadian journal of psychology.

[7]  R. Aslin,et al.  Preference for infant-directed speech in the first month after birth. , 1990, Child development.

[8]  D. Drotar,et al.  The impact of postpartum depressed mood on mother-infant interaction: Like mother like baby? , 1991 .

[9]  H. Papoušek,et al.  The meanings of melodies in motherese in tone and stress languages , 1991 .

[10]  L. Cosmides,et al.  The Adapted mind : evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture , 1992 .

[11]  A. Fernald.  Human maternal vocalizations to infants as biologically relevant signals: An evolutionary perspective. , 1992 .

[12]  Terri Gullickson,et al.  Annals of Child Development , 1995 .

[13]  M. O’Hara,et al.  Rates and risk of postpartum depression—a meta-analysis , 1996 .

[14]  P. Kaplan,et al.  Infant-Directed versus Adult-Directed Speech as Signals for Faces. , 1996 .

[15]  K. Scherer,et al.  Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression. , 1996, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[16]  P. Kuhl,et al.  Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. , 1997, Science.

[17]  L. Trainor,et al.  The Acoustic Basis of Preferences for Infant-Directed Singing , 1997 .

[18]  N. Masataka.  Preference for infant-directed singing in 2-day-old hearing infants of deaf parents. , 1999, Developmental psychology.

[19]  L. Trainor,et al.  Is Infant-Directed Speech Prosody a Result of the Vocal Expression of Emotion? , 2000, Psychological science.

[20]  S. Trehub,et al.  Emotion and music in infancy , 2001 .

[21]  J. Bachorowski,et al.  Role of Clinical Diagnosis and Medication Use in Effects of Maternal Depression on Infant-Directed Speech. , 2001, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[22]  J. Bachorowski,et al.  Infants of Depressed Mothers, Although Competent Learners, Fail to Learn in Response to Their Own Mothers' Infant-Directed Speech , 2002, Psychological science.

[23]  Michael J. Owren,et al.  Vocal acoustics in emotional intelligence. , 2002 .

[24]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Representation of the Gender of Human Faces by Infants: A Preference for Female , 2002, Perception.

[25]  Leher Singh,et al.  Infants' Listening Preferences: Baby Talk or Happy Talk? , 2002, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[26]  P. Salovey,et al.  The wisdom in feeling: psychological processes in emotional intelligence , 2002 .

[27]  K. Wynn,et al.  Attribution of Dispositional States by 12-Month-Olds , 2003, Psychological science.

[28]  P. Kuhl.  Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code , 2004, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[29]  Erik D. Thiessen,et al.  Infant-Directed Speech Facilitates Word Segmentation. , 2005, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[30]  G. Csibra,et al.  Social learning and social cognition: The case for pedagogy , 2006 .

[31]  Y. Bar-Haim,et al.  Nature and Nurture in Own-Race Face Processing , 2006, Psychological science.

[32]  R. Aslin.  What's in a look? , 2007, Developmental science.

[33]  Katherine D. Kinzler,et al.  The native language of social cognition , 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[34]  G. Gergely,et al.  On pedagogy. , 2007, Developmental science.

[35]  Paul Bloom,et al.  Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants , 2008, Pediatric Research.

[36]  J. Hamlin,et al.  Three-month-olds show a negativity bias in their social evaluations. , 2010, Developmental science.