Infants’ Preferences for the Face of an Infant-Directed Speaker: Effects of Maternal Depression, Correlates with Concurrent Cognitive and Receptive Communicative Development, and a Test of a Social Mediation Hypothesis

Abstract

Preferences for the face of a familiarized female infant-directed (ID) speaker versus a novel female face were investigated in a cumulative sample of 157 3.5- to 15-month-old infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers. Duration of looking during a 1-min familiarization phase was negatively correlated with infant age but unrelated to maternal depression and subsequent infant face preferences. Infants of depressed mothers exhibited significantly lower preference ratios for the familiarized face than did infants of non-depressed mothers, in replication of prior work, albeit with a smaller effect size. IDS face preference ratios were significantly positively correlated with the concurrently assessed Cognitive (Cog) and Receptive Communication (RC) subscales of the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (3rd Edition; BSID-III), and regression analyses revealed that after socio-demographic correlates of depression and duration of looking during familiarization were controlled, ID face preference ratios were associated with significant increments in proportion of variance of Cog and RC scores accounted for. To test the hypothesis that the association between ID speaker face preferences and Bayley Scale performance was mediated by the quality of the caregiver-infant relationship, composite interactive scales derived from semi-structured play interactions using the Coding Interactive Behavior (CIB) system were tested in moderated mediation analyses. None of the CIB scales were significant mediators of the link between infant ID face preferences and BSID-II performance. General attentional and cognitive processes common to the two assessments may be responsible for the observed correlations.

Keywords: Infant-directed speech, face preferences, familiarization-preference test, cognitive and communicative development, interactive behavior