Co-occupation is the mutual engagement of two people in a shared occupation. Recent research has investigated co-occupational activities during sensitive periods to inform clinical practice. However, there remains a dearth of applied research to bridge gaps between research and practice within salient co-occupational relationships between caregivers and infants. The study applied co-occupational constructs of physicality, emotionality, and intentionality within caregiver–infant dyads across infancy. These constructs were examined in relation to caregiver–infant reciprocity in other domains (i.e., language, motor, and affective) to determine the overlapping features of reciprocal co-occupation with established aspects of reciprocity. Results suggest that as infants transitioned into toddlerhood and became more mobile and intentional in behavior, there were observable changes in caregiver–infant reciprocity. Caregiver utterances, affect, touch, and co-occupation were significantly related within and across time, highlighting the need for more studies to disentangle these relations in reference to infant development.

Purpose To better enable communication among researchers, clinicians, and caregivers, we aimed to assess how untrained listeners classify early infant vocalization types in comparison to terms currently used by researchers and clinicians. Method Listeners were caregivers with no prior formal education in speech and language development. A 1st group of listeners reported on clinician/researcher-classified vowel, squeal, growl, raspberry, whisper, laugh, and cry vocalizations obtained from archived video/audio recordings of 10 infants from 4 through 12 months of age. A list of commonly used terms was generated based on listener responses and the standard research terminology. A 2nd group of listeners was presented with the same vocalizations and asked to select terms from the list that they thought best described the sounds. Results Classifications of the vocalizations by listeners largely overlapped with published categorical descriptors and yielded additional insight into alternate terms commonly used. The biggest discrepancies were found for the vowel category. Conclusion Prior research has shown that caregivers are accurate in identifying canonical babbling, a major prelinguistic vocalization milestone occurring at about 6-7 months of age. This indicates that caregivers are also well attuned to even earlier emerging vocalization types. This supports the value of continuing basic and clinical research on the vocal types infants produce in the 1st months of life and on their potential diagnostic utility, and may also help improve communication between speech-language pathologists and families.

Phonetic repertoires in babbling are an important marker of prelinguistic development. Typical phonetic development, however, is difficult to identify given variability within and across infants. Prior to 18 months of infant age, caregiver report of prelinguistic vocal development is often an important part of clinical practice for early intervention. As a first step toward understanding the utility of caregiver report of babbling, the purpose of this exploratory study was to determine how the phonetic makeup of sounds reported by caregivers in infant babbling would develop, in particular comparison to markedness theory and established norms. In a longitudinal design, caregiver report was tracked through weekly interviews from 7 to 18 months of infant age (N = 15). Reports were phonetically transcribed and examined in terms of the number of utterances; place, manner, and voicing for consonants; and tongue position for vowels. In general, the number of utterances and phonetic segments reported by caregivers increased significantly with infant age (p < .05) and phonetic feature patterns were similar to what one would expect in the vocal development of English-learning infants. Results support the notion that caregiver report of infant vocalizations may provide a valuable means for describing early infant babbling development.

Purpose We aimed to provide novel information on utterance duration as it relates to vocal type, facial affect, gaze direction, and age in the prelinguistic/early linguistic infant. Method Infant utterances were analyzed from longitudinal recordings of 15 infants at 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 months of age. Utterance durations were measured and coded for vocal type (i.e., squeal, growl, raspberry, vowel, cry, laugh), facial affect (i.e., positive, negative, neutral), and gaze direction (i.e., to person, to mirror, or not directed). Results Of the 18,236 utterances analyzed, durations were typically shortest at 14 months of age and longest at 16 months of age. Statistically significant changes were observed in utterance durations across age for all variables of interest. Conclusion Despite variation in duration of infant utterances, developmental patterns were observed. For these infants, utterance durations appear to become more consolidated later in development, after the 1st year of life. Indeed, 12 months is often noted as the typical age of onset for 1st words and might possibly be a point in time when utterance durations begin to show patterns across communicative variables.

The current review examines how neurobiological models of language and cognition could shed light on the role of phonological working memory (PWM) in developmental stuttering (DS). Toward that aim, we review Baddeley's influential multicomponent model of PWM and evidence for load-dependent differences between children and adults who stutter and typically fluent speakers in nonword repetition and dual-task paradigms. We suggest that, while nonword repetition and dual-task findings implicate processes related to PWM, it is unclear from behavioral studies alone what mechanisms are involved. To address how PWM could be related to speech output in DS, a third section reviews neurobiological models of language proposing that PWM is an emergent property of cyclic sensory and motor buffers in the dorsal stream critical for speech production. We propose that anomalous sensorimotor timing could potentially interrupt both fluent speech in DS and the emergent properties of PWM. To further address the role of attention and executive function in PWM and DS, we also review neurobiological models proposing that prefrontal cortex (PFC) and basal ganglia (BG) function to facilitate working memory under distracting conditions and neuroimaging evidence implicating the PFC and BG in stuttering. Finally, we argue that cognitive-behavioral differences in nonword repetition and dual-tasks are consistent with the involvement of neurocognitive networks related to executive function and sensorimotor integration in PWM. We suggest progress in understanding the relationship between stuttering and PWM may be accomplished using high-temporal resolution electromagnetic experimental approaches.

Seeking roots of language, we probed infant facial expressions and vocalizations. Both have roles in language, but the voice plays an especially flexible role, expressing a variety of functions and affect conditions with the same vocal categories-a word can be produced with many different affective flavors. This requirement of language is seen in very early infant vocalizations. We examined the extent to which affect is transmitted by early vocal categories termed "protophones" (squeals, vowel-like sounds, and growls) and by their co-occurring facial expressions, and similarly the extent to which vocal type is transmitted by the voice and co-occurring facial expressions. Our coder agreement data suggest infant affect during protophones was most reliably transmitted by the face (judged in video-only), while vocal type was transmitted most reliably by the voice (judged in audio-only). Voice alone transmitted negative affect more reliably than neutral or positive affect, suggesting infant protophones may be used especially to call for attention when the infant is in distress. By contrast, the face alone provided no significant information about protophone categories. Indeed coders in VID could scarcely recognize the difference between silence and voice when coding protophones in VID. The results suggest that partial decoupling of communicative roles for face and voice occurs even in the first months of life. Affect in infancy appears to be transmitted in a way that audio and video aspects are flexibly interwoven, as in mature language.

Date Presented 3/30/2017 Infant–maternal reciprocity may be captured and represented through play. Play construction, purpose, object choice, and type were observed and coded using a retrospective analysis, demonstrating an increase in frequency and duration in most categories. Primary Author and Speaker: Bryan Gee Additional Authors and Speakers: Susan Kunkel Contributing Authors: Hillary Swann, Nancy Devine, Nicholas Burgett, Nicki Aubuchon-Endsley, Michele R. Brumley, Heather Ramsdell-Hudock

The purpose of this article is to articulate and provide detail about an interprofessional research collaboration at a public university in a rural area of western United States. This interprofessional research collaboration was organized to explore infant and maternal reciprocity. As a part of the organization and process portion of the collaborative effort, the authors identify the unique attributes of their collaboration. Additionally, barriers to collaborative research are presented, with opportunities and recommendations made to support existing and future interprofessional collaborative efforts for basic science scholars, clinicians, and educators in health-related professions.

Abstract Date Presented 4/8/2016 A retrospective study exploring the bidirectionality of reciprocity in infants and mothers revealed changes occurring over 6 mo in several domains. The retrospective analysis creates a novel process of assessing development through the lens of reciprocity. Primary Author and Speaker: Bryan Gee Additional Authors and Speakers: Susan Kunkle, Lauren Troy Contributing Authors: Hillary Swann, Nancy Devine, Nicholas Burgett, Nicki Aubuchon-Endsley, Michele R. Brumley, Heather Ramsdell-Hudock

During the first two years of life, human infants produce increasing numbers of speech-like (canonical) syllables. Both basic research on child speech development and clinical work assessing a child's pre-speech capabilities stand to benefit from efficient, accurate, and consistent methods for counting the syllables present in a given infant utterance. To date, there have been only a few attempts to perform syllable counting in infant vocalizations automatically, and thorough comparisons to human listener counts are lacking. We apply four existing, openly available systems for detecting syllabic, consonant, or vowel elements in vocalizations and apply them to a set of infant utterances individually and in combination. With the automated methods, we obtain canonical syllable counts that correlate well enough with trained human listener counts to replicate the pattern of increasing canonical syllable frequency as infants get older. However, agreement between the automated methods and human listener canonical syllable counts is considerably weaker than human listeners' agreement with each other. On the other hand, automatic identification of syllable-like units of any type (canonical and non-canonical both included) match human listeners' judgments quite well. Interestingly, these total syllable counts also increase with infant age.

Much is known about the development of speech perception, but there remain gaps in understanding in the development of speech production. Social interaction is a popular topic among researchers of human development, and the development of speech production is clearly dependent upon social interaction (Goldstein et al., 2003; Goldstein and Schwade, 2008). The importance of social interaction becomes particularly apparent when infants begin to speak the language of their ambient environment (Lewkowicz and Hansen-Tift, 2012). Prior to first word production, however, an exchange between caregivers and infants occurs, such that infant vocalizations and other changes in development directly influence caregiver responses, which in turn influence various components of interaction.