Vocal communication is tied to interpersonal arousal coupling in caregiver-infant dyads

Abstract
Data availability
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Abstract

It has been argued that a necessary condition for the emergence of speech in humans is the ability to vocalize irrespectively of underlying affective states, but when and how this happens during development remains unclear. To examine this, we used wearable microphones and autonomic sensors to collect multimodal naturalistic datasets from 12-month-olds and their caregivers. We observed that, across the day, clusters of vocalisations occur during elevated infant and caregiver arousal. This relationship is stronger in infants than caregivers: caregivers vocalizations show greater decoupling with their own states of arousal, and their vocal production is more influenced by the infant's arousal than their own. Different types of vocalisation elicit different patterns of change across the dyad. Cries occur following reduced infant arousal stability and lead to increased child-caregiver arousal coupling, and decreased infant arousal. Speech-like vocalisations also occur at elevated arousal, but lead to longer-lasting increases in arousal, and elicit more parental verbal responses. Our results suggest that: 12-month-old infants' vocalisations are strongly contingent on their arousal state (for both cries and speech-like vocalisations), whereas adults' vocalisations are more flexibly tied to their own arousal; that cries and speech-like vocalisations alter the intra-dyadic dynamics of arousal in different ways, which may be an important factor driving speech development; and that this selection mechanism which drives vocal development is anchored in our stress physiology.

Data availability

Due to the personally identifiable nature of this data (home voice recordings from infants) the raw data is not publicly accessible. Researchers who wish to access the raw data should email the lead author s.v.wass@uel.ac.uk. Permission to access the raw data will be granted as long as the applicant can guarantee that certain privacy guidelines (e.g. storing the data only on secure, encrypted servers, and a guarantee not to share it with anyone else) can be provided. In order to allow access to the raw data the name of the applicant will also need to be added to our current ethics approval from the University of East London. This is expected to be routine, as long as the applicant is able to provide these guarantees. De-identified versions of the data - i.e. the processed Autonomic Nervous System data, and the raw coding showing the timings of when vocalisations were recorded, is available here: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.612jm6473. The code used to conduct the analyses is available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7409281. A readme file in the Data folder explains how to run the analyses to reproduce the results that we report in the paper. For any queries, please contact the lead author s.v.wass@uel.ac.uk.

The following data sets were generated

1. Wass S
(2022) Vocal communication is tied to interpersonal arousal coupling in caregiver-infant dyads
Dryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.612jm6473.

https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.612jm6473
1. Samuel Vincent Wass
(2022) Vocal communication is tied to interpersonal arousal coupling in caregiver-infant dyads
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7409281.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7409281

Article and author information

Author details

Sam Wass

Department of Psychology, University of East London, London, United Kingdom

For correspondence
s.v.wass@uel.ac.uk

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7421-3493
Emily Phillips

Department of Psychology, University of East London, London, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Celia Smith

Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Elizabeth OOB Fatimehin

Department of Psychology, University of East London, London, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5179-9583
Louise Goupil

Department of Psychology, University of East London, London, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Economic and Social Research Council (ES/N017560/1)

Sam Wass

European Research Council (JDIL 845859)

Louise Goupil

European Research Council (ONACSA 853251)

Sam Wass

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: The project was approved by the Research Ethics Committee at the University of East London (Approval number: EXP 1617 04). Informed consent, and intent to publish, were obtained in the usual manner.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.