Parental Responses to Infants’ Prelinguistic Vocalization

Lee, Yuran; Ha, Seunghee; Lee, Yuran; Ha, Seunghee

doi:2021.26.1.13

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2021;26(1): 13-21.
Published online March 31, 2021.
doi: https://doi.org/10.12963/csd.21797

Parental Responses to Infants’ Prelinguistic Vocalization

Yuran Lee^a

, and Seunghee Ha^b

^aGraduate Program in Speech Language Pathology, Hallym University, Chuncheon, Korea
^bDivision of Speech Pathology and Audiology, Audiology and Speech Pathology Research Institute, Hallym University, Chuncheon, Korea

Corresponding Author: Seunghee Ha ,Tel: +82-33-248-2215, Fax: +82-33-256-3420, Email: shha@hallym.ac.kr

Received January 5, 2021 Revised: February 5, 2021 Accepted February 5, 2021

ABSTRACT

Objectives
The purpose of this study was to examine parents’ responses and response types that appear after infants’ vocalization based on the interaction data between parents and infants which were collected in a natural environment.
Methods
Data was collected using the LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) from 20 infants aged 8 to 9 months and their parents. Twenty 5-minute recorded data with the highest child vocalization rate were analyzed. Infants’ vocalizations were classified into canonical babblings and non-canonical babblings depending on whether they included consonant-vowel syllables. Parental responses were divided into no-response, contingent response, and non-contingent responses related to the infant’s vocalization. The contingent responses were subdivided into eight types of responses.
Results
Although the no-response proportion was the highest, contingent responses related to the infant’s vocalization were also higher than non-contingent responses, accounting for 24.51% of all interactions. Among the response’ types, parents often used language-expectant types that elicit the infant’s vocalization and provide verbal modeling or input including acknowledgment. In particular, language-expectant types appeared more frequently following canonical babblings than non-canonical babblings.
Conclusion
This study showed that parents respond differently depending on infants’ types of vocalization. The relationship between parental contingent responses and infants’ speechlanguage development may provide useful information for early intervention programs.

Keywords: Parental responses | Response types | Prelinguistic vocalization | LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis)