title: Volubility of the human infant: Effects of parental interaction (or lack of it).
abstract: Although parental volubility, or amount of talk, has received considerable recent attention, infant volubility has received comparatively little attention despite its potential significance for communicative risk status and later linguistic and cognitive outcomes. Volubility of 16 typically developing infants from 2 to 11 months of age was longitudinally investigated in the present study across three social circumstances: parent talking to infant, parent not talking to infant and parent talking to interviewer while the infant was in the room. Results indicated that volubility was least in the Interview circumstance. There were no significant differences in volubility between the parent Talk and No Talk circumstances. Volubility was found to reduce with age. These results suggest that infants vocalise in a variety of circumstances, even when no one talks to or interacts with them. The presence of a stranger or perhaps overhearing adults speaking to each other, however, may significantly reduce infant volubility.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Communication Sciences and Special Education , University of Georgia , Athens , GA , USA.
authors.forename: Suneeti Nathani
authors.initials: SN
authors.lastname: Iyer
authors.affiliation: a Department of Communication Sciences and Special Education , University of Georgia , Athens , GA , USA.
authors.forename: Hailey
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Denson
authors.affiliation: b Department of Statistics , University of Georgia , Athens , GA , USA.
authors.forename: Nicole
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Lazar
authors.affiliation: c School of Communication Sciences and Disorders , University of Memphis , Memphis , TN , USA.|d Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research , Klosterneuburg , Austria.
authors.forename: D Kimbrough
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Oller
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D010290:Parents; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Infant volubility; parent-infant interaction; parental interview; parental talk; prelinguistic vocalisation