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      Reliability of Listener Judgments of Infant Vocal Imitation

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          Abstract

          There are many theories surrounding infant imitation; however, there is no research to our knowledge evaluating the reliability of listener perception of vocal imitation in prelinguistic infants. This paper evaluates intra- and inter-rater judgments on the degree of “imitativeness” in utterances of infants below 12 months of age. 18 listeners were presented audio segments selected from naturalistic recordings to represent in each case a parent vocal model followed by an infant utterance ranging from low to high degrees of imitativeness. The naturalistic data suggested vocal imitation occurred rarely across the first year, but strong intra- and inter-rater correlations were found for judgments of imitativeness. Our results suggest salience of the infant's vocal imitation despite its rare occurrence as well as active perception by listeners of the imitative signal. We discuss infant vocal imitation as a potential signal of well-being as perceived by caregivers.

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          Most cited references55

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          Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-reading.

          V Gallese (1998)
          A new class of visuomotor neuron has been recently discovered in the monkey's premotor cortex: mirror neurons. These neurons respond both when a particular action is performed by the recorded monkey and when the same action, performed by another individual, is observed. Mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system matching observation and execution of goal-related motor actions. Experimental evidence suggests that a similar matching system also exists in humans. What might be the functional role of this matching system? One possible function is to enable an organism to detect certain mental states of observed conspecifics. This function might be part of, or a precursor to, a more general mind-reading ability. Two different accounts of mind-reading have been suggested. According to `theory theory', mental states are represented as inferred posits of a naive theory. According to `simulation theory', other people's mental states are represented by adopting their perspective: by tracking or matching their states with resonant states of one's own. The activity of mirror neurons, and the fact that observers undergo motor facilitation in the same muscular groups as those utilized by target agents, are findings that accord well with simulation theory but would not be predicted by theory theory.
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            Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates.

            Infants between 12 and 21 days of age can imitate both facial and manual gestures; this behavior cannot be explained in terms of either conditioning or innate releasing mechanisms. Such imitation implies that human neonates can equate their own unseen behaviors with gestures they see others perform.
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              The specificity of environmental influence: socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech.

              Erika Hoff (2015)
              The hypothesis was tested that children whose families differ in socioeconomic status (SES) differ in their rates of productive vocabulary development because they have different language-learning experiences. Naturalistic interaction between 33 high-SES and 30 mid-SES mothers and their 2-year-old children was recorded at 2 time points 10 weeks apart. Transcripts of these interactions provided the basis for estimating the growth in children's productive vocabularies between the first and second visits and properties of maternal speech at the first visit. The high-SES children grew more than the mid-SES children in the size of their productive vocabularies. Properties of maternal speech that differed as a function of SES fully accounted for this difference. Implications of these findings for mechanisms of environmental influence on child development are discussed.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                11 June 2019
                2019
                : 10
                : 1340
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Infant Vocalizations Laboratory, School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Memphis , Memphis, TN, United States
                [2] 2Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research , Klosterneuburg, Austria
                [3] 3Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis , Memphis, TN, United States
                [4] 4Department of Mathematical Sciences HL, University of Memphis , Memphis, TN, United States
                Author notes

                Edited by: Huei-Mei Liu, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

                Reviewed by: Manuela Filippa, Université de Genève, Switzerland; Mili Mathew, St. Cloud State University, United States

                *Correspondence: Helen L. Long hlong@ 123456memphis.edu

                This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01340
                6579846
                31244735
                0af859ea-64b9-45ca-b4d6-85b18eb94996
                Copyright © 2019 Long, Oller and Bowman.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 24 January 2019
                : 23 May 2019
                Page count
                Figures: 2, Tables: 1, Equations: 0, References: 75, Pages: 10, Words: 9144
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                infant vocalizations,infant imitation,prelinguistic vocal development,evolution of language,auditory perception,language development

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