Parent-Infant Interactional Synchrony in Neonatal Babies.

Abstract

Interactional synchrony is a theory of social communication where behaviours of one or more individual become synchronised. Condon and Sander (1974) suggested that infants can syncronise their bodily movements with the prosody of adult speech. The present study hypothesised that interactional synchrony does exist between adult speech prosody and neonate movements, and that these occurrences are particularly at the instances of prosodic stress in adult speech. Movements of two male infants and two female infants aged four to thirteen weeks, while their parent interacted with them, were analysed using motion capture technology and audio-video recording. Movement events were analysed and segmented using computerised motion capture data, and vocal events were analysed using computerised speech segmentation software. No evidence was found for synchrony between infant movement and adult speech, and neither prosodic stress nor phoneme types elicited any particular demonstration of this. Therefore, neither hypotheses were supported, yet the anticipated findings could perhaps be obtained through constructing a more robust analysis design and including additional measures.