Rhythmic scaffolding of child-directed speech and neural synchrony in child-caregiver interactions

Previous evidence suggests there is an overlap between the rhythms of speech units (stress, syllables) and the timescales at which neurophysiological mechanisms operate in the brain, for example, neural oscillations. Previous research has also suggested that while these mechanisms become more language-specific during the first years of life, these mechanisms are highly influenced by the rhythmical properties of the environment. It is still unclear, however, how the rhythmical properties of the environment influence caregiver-child interactions. Specifically, whether the temporal regularities found in child-directed speech (CDS) can influence caregiver-child interactions, as in whether their inter-personal neural synchrony is driven by those regularities or are separate mechanisms. This project aims to understand whether and how the temporal regularities of CDS are related to neural synchrony in child-caregiver interactions, by decomposing the acoustic signal into spectral-amplitude modulations, stress rate, and syllable rate and correlating those with the time-frequency information of neural synchrony.