Multimodal Dimensions of Hungarian Infant-Directed Communication During Storytelling

Adults, when talking to infants, adjust their communication across several dimensions, including acoustic, linguistic, and gestural characteristics. However, our knowledge of how these dimensions covary in this register adjustment remains limited. Our objective was to analyze the linguistic elements, gestures and acoustic features (speech rate, vowel space, prosody) of storytelling directed to 6-month-old infants in a multidimensional way. The storytelling of 92 mothers to their own children was investigated and compared to their communication with other adults. We analyzed the acoustic features, gestures, and the linguistic construction of their storytelling. Our results have shown that pointing and showing gestures were more common in infant-directed storytelling, just as interactive expressions unrelated to the story were. The correlation tests across dimensions revealed that infant-directed communication is multidimensional. The cross-dimensional analyses demonstrated that infant-directed communication, compared to adult-directed communication, exhibited more systematic multidimensional coordination. Mothers who used more gestures and interactive elements in their infant-directed communication also tended to modify the acoustic characteristics of their speech to a greater extent relative to their adult-directed speech.