Computationally analyzing the hierarchical complexity of infants' social coordination on multi scales in natural daily life to investigate infants' cognitive development

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This project aims at quantifying social modalities and multi-scales to find the multi-combining computational mechanisms in infants’ interactive development. The current achievements focused on the first two of the three research questions: Q1. What cues in which modality do infants accept from the social-interactive environment in which time scale? Q2. How do infants manage the cues to interact with the environment inter/across time scale(s)?A multi-scales analysis framework was proposed based on the prosodic alignment between infants and caregivers in daily interaction. The framework analyzed the day-long audio data from a Tseltal corpus. The results revealed that infants’ and caregivers’ vocalizations are differently coordinated on each timescale, . Furthermore, the same analysis was conducted on a Canadian-English corpus with audio data under similar collection conditions. The results reveal that maternal prosodic alignment occurs in English but not Tseltal, while infant alignment to caregivers is weak but similarly present across cultures. Interestingly, Tseltal dyads were more likely than Canadian ones to show increases in prosodic alignment over longer sequences of interaction. A conference paper and a poster based on these results were presented at (Li, J., et al., ICDL 2022) and (Li, J., et al., SRCD 2023).Current findings stressed that infants received varied auditory cues from the environment on a global, a middle, and a local scale (Q1). Moreover, infants also behave differently, corresponding to these cues across time scales. (Q2)