Turn-taking
How do babies take turns from others at a young age?
Babies already take turns from other people in proto-conversations at two months of age, preceding the ability to understand the linguistic content of a conversation or to produce meaningful language. Thus, young children start actively participating in vocal exchanges, raising the question of what kinds of cues they use to do so.
We are interested in the research topics including but are not limited to a) What cues do babies take to give a response? b) Do babies coordinate to other people’s vocalisations? How do the interlocutors influence each other during communicating? c) How do babies develop their communicative abilities through turn taking?
To answer those questions, we investigate babies and their caregivers vocal exchanges in their home environment.
Day-long auditory data are longitudinally recorded from 6-18 months. Several advanced artificial techniques are introduced to do the analysis. This research will benefit a deeper understanding of the toolkits for interactive development and the influence of environmental factors on language learning.
Reference
Li, J., Casillas, M., Tsuji, S. & Nagai, Y. Multi-scale analysis of vocal coordination in infant-caregiver daily interaction. IEEE ICDL conference.
Jiarui Li, Marisa Casillas, Yukie Nagai, and Sho Tsuji “Infant-Caregiver Vocal Coordination in Daily Interaction in Tseltal and Canadian English,” in Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, accepted, March 23-25, 2023.