更新日:2013/09/19
Multimodal interactions between mothers and infants influence mothers’ processing of tactile onomatopoeias
Yukari Tanaka (Kyoto Univ.)
Abstract:
In everyday life, Japanese mothers often provide their infants with tactile experiences accompanied by tactile onomatopoeias in the infant-directed speech (IDS) manner. We investigated whether maternal experiences of multimodal interaction with infants influence their neural processing of multimodal information. We measured event-related potentials (ERP) of mothers and non-mothers in the tactile-to-auditory priming paradigm. Tactile priming was congruent or incongruent to tactile onomatopoeias, accompanied with the prosody of IDS or ADS. We analyzed ERPs during the presentation of the auditory stimuli for each condition (ADS-congruent, ADS-incongruent, IDS-congruent, IDS-incongruent). We also investigated mothers’ frequency of using tactile onomatopoeias in daily life. We found that mothers showed greater ERP responses to IDS-incongruent than IDS-congruent stimuli in the middle frontal region, whereas non-mothers showed no significant differences. This congruency effect of mothers were related their frequency rate of using tactile onomatopoeias in daily interactions with infants. The results suggested that maternal high frequency use of onomatopoeias and tactile experiences during interaction with infants enhance mothers’ detection of multimodal incongruity in the context of ID speech. For future research, we discuss that the style of multimodal interaction might facilitate language acquisition of infants based on multi sensory and motor experiences.
