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Infants’ early environments are replete with statistical regularities and temporally structured information that shapes their everyday learning. We explored the temporal structure of infants cry and speech-like vocalizations and its relation to language development. Our goals were to 1) examine infants’ cry and speech-like vocalizations, 2) quantify the temporal structure of these vocalizations, and 3) investigate the relationship between the temporal structure of vocalizations and infants’ vocabulary growth. We conducted 13 school-day LENA recordings over 10 months in an early intervention childcare classroom for late-talking infants. We quantified the temporal structure of vocalizations (calculating their burstiness and temporal dependency), revealing infants' cry and speech-like vocalizations are highly bursty and temporally dependent. Furthermore, these constructs significantly predict infants’ vocabulary growth over the course of the year. Taken together, our results imply that the temporal spacing of infants’ vocalizations may describe a level of everyday predictability, regularity, and memory interacting with early language learners. This research was funded by a Grant from the National Science Foundation (IP: Daniel Messinger). |
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