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INFANT-DIRECTED SPEECH, MATEKNAL DEPRESSION AND INFANT ASSOCl-ATrVE LEARNING

Ahna L. Hoff, Peter S. Kaplan, and Patricia Zarlengo-Strouse

Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Denver, CO 80217

Jo-Anne Bachorowski

Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240

Maternal depression is thought to disrupt the normal process by which caregivers evaluate and then regulate infants’ states of arousal and affect through repetitive and rhythmic vocal, facial, gestural, kinesthetic, and tactile stimulation. The resulting emotional and state dysregulation is postulated to contribute to the elevated risk of these infants for later problems in affect regulation, attachment, and cognition. The current experiments focused on one such channel of stimulation, the speech channel. Jnfant directed (ID) speech has been shown to play an important role in the modulation of infant attention, affect, and state of arousal. Compared with adult-directed (AD) speech, ID speech is more effective at engaging and maintaining attention, modulating arousal, communicating affect, and facilitating leaming and information-processing. Prior work in our laboratory has shown that ID speech segments am more effective than are AD speech segments as signals or conditioned stimuli for face reinforcers in a conditioned attention paradigm. Here, we report the findings from 2 experiments ex amining the signaling effectiveness of ID speech produced by adult and teen mothers varying in self-reported symptoms of depression.

In Experiment 1,10-s speech segments of uniform linguistic content were recorded from 20 primarily white, middle-class, college-educated mothers (average age 33.9 years) during structured play interactions with their 2-6 month-old infants. Mothers varied in self- reported symptoms of depression, as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Later, their speech segments were used in a conditioned attention study with 205 infants of nondepressed mothers. After 6 forward pairings of speech segments and faces, speech segments were assessed for their ability to increase time spent looking at a novel checkerboard pattern (summation test). Figure 1 shows that significant positive summation, an index of associative learning, was obtained in groups of infants tested with speech produced by mothers with comparatively fewer self-reported symptoms of depression (Beck Depression Inventory or BDI I 15), but significant positive summation was not achieved using speech produced by mothers with comparatively more symptoms of depression (BDI > 15). An ANOVA examining summation test scores as a function of 3 BDI categories confirmed these findings, &2,202) = 5.97, p c .Ol, and subsequent Newman-Keuls tests yielded a significant effect (p < .Ol) for difference scores between infants tested with speech segments produced by mothers in the high-BDI category and those in the low- and mid-BDI categories.

Experiment 2, currently in progress, used speech samples produced by 20 teen mothers (including eight Hispanic and four African-American mothers) from working- or middle-class families (average age 16.4 years). Again, mothers varied in self-reported symptoms of depression. Preliminary results indicate a very strong negative correlation between BDI score and summation test score k = -0.92). Taken together, tbe results of these two experiments show that the ID speech produced by mothers with symptoms of depression does not promote associative learning in infants, and that this conclusion may hold with demographically diverse samples of mothers. Acoustic differences in speech samples produced by mothers varying in self-reported symptoms of depression will be discussed.