Name:Sara Ripley

School/Affiliation:McMaster University

Co-Authors:Sara Ripley *, Wei Fang, Rafael Román-Caballero, Caitlyn Humber, Serena Zhang, Naiqi G. Xiao, and Laurel Trainor

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Short Bio:

I'm a second year PhD student in Dr. Trainor's Auditory Development Lab. I'm interested in caregiver–infant interactions and how the interaction dynamics differ depending on whether caregivers sing or speak to their infants. I am interested in not only the caregiver's influence on the infant, but also the infant's influence on the caregiver's behaviour (i.e., the bidirectional coordination that occurs between the caregiver and infant).

Abstract:

The social, physiological, and behavioural signals exchanged between an infant and their primary caregiver are critical for infant development. Universally, caregivers communicate with their infants via both infant-directed (ID) singing and speech. Infants have been shown to coordinate their gaze to a singer’s eyes with the beat of ID singing, suggesting the eyes contain important social information on rhythmically strong beats. Since this research relied on infants watching video stimuli, here we are examining whether the same effect exists in live caregiver–infant interactions for both ID song and speech. To accomplish this, we are using dual eye tracking (two EyeLink eye-trackers) as well as an app developed in-house to extract facial details of mothers and their 4- to 5-month-old infants from iPhone video during interactions. We are also investigating whether blinking serves as a social cue in caregiver–infant interactions, as it does in adult conversations. Adult listeners have been shown to blink at the time of a speaker’s phrase boundaries, and to coordinate their blinks with those of the speaker. Finally, we are exploring caregiver and infant gaze patterns to each other’s face, with particular interest in looking to the eyes and mouth. During the session, mothers are asked to sing and speak in a way to grab their infant’s attention and keep them happy. Preliminary results suggest caregivers blink less at the phrase boundaries of both ID song and speech, and that infants are more likely to look to the caregiver’s eyes just before the beats in ID singing and the stressed vowels in ID speech.