Baby Talk & More
These are the five ways that parents "talk" to babies, including things such as making faces.
What are speech, action, gesture, emotion, and touch?
A 10-week randomized trial found that increased infant-directed singing caused significant general improvements to this for the infant, but notably not for the caregiver.
What is mood?
Infants frequently step on this type of "surface," which includes toys, laundry, and books strewn on the floor.
What are objects?
Researchers compared individual differences in navigation skill across these three paradigms (one real-world and two virtual).
What are Temple Tour, Square Town, and Virtual SILCton?
This is the restrictive cultural cradling practice in Tajikistan where infants are swaddled and bound for up to 20 hours a day.
What is the gahvora?
Parents are multitasking pros; this percentage of the time they are doing something else (like pointing) while they talk to their baby.
What is over 60%?
This research method, used via smartphone surveys, samples infant behavior and mood in real-time at random intervals to minimize recall bias.
What is Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA)?
A single "walking session" for a baby usually lasts only about this many seconds.
What is 2 seconds?
This visuospatial skill was found to be a significant predictor of performance in both virtual environments, but not the real-world one.
What is Mental Rotation (MRT)?
Despite sparse environments and restrictive cradling, Tajik infants spend approximately this proportion of their time engaged with objects.
What is 50%?
When a baby points at something or makes a noise, parents usually ramp up the energy by using more of these overlapping multimodal signals.
What are infant directed speech and/or gestures?
Parents in the singing group naturally started singing more often during this stressful daily task.
What is soothing a fussy baby?
The four main "switches" babies make are: getting up, stopping/starting, moving rooms, and stepping on this.
What is a different surface?
This self-report measure aims to quantify an individual’s perceived "sense of direction."
What is the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction (SBSOD) scale?
This object category was the most frequently contacted by Tajik infants but also the least varied (only 18% were unique).
What are toys?
Research shows that caregivers use a higher dimensionality of IDC when interacting with infants who have this specific linguistic characteristic.
What are smaller vocabularies?
While infant mood improved, the study detected no significant interaction effects for these two other music-related variables.
What are playing recorded music and caregivers' personal music listening?
A baby who is learning to walk is a "moving machine," on average they're doing about 642 of these every single hour.
What are total transitions?
This skill—imagining what someone else sees—actually helped people find their way in both the real world and "Square Town."
What is perspective taking (PTT-A)?
While pre-walkers spend most of their object play time here, walkers split their time between this location and the outdoors.
What is the indoors?
This is the name of the parent-report questionnaire often used to measure an infant's vocabulary size in these studies.
What is the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI)?
In the manipulation group, the frequency of caregivers reporting they had recently sung to their infant reached almost this percentage by the final week.
What is 90%? (actual report was 89%)
Contrary to the idea that infants must stop before moving, this percentage of standing bouts lasted less than one second.
What is 12%?
Factor analysis revealed that navigation performance is best explained by this specific paradigm model.
What is the paradigm-based trifactorial model?
Research found that the frequency, diversity, and location of object play did not vary based on this metric from the infant's previous day.
What is the number or hours spent in a gahvora cradle?