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

本项目旨在量化社会模式和多尺度，寻找婴儿互动发展的多组合计算机制。目前的成果主要集中在三个研究问题中的前两个：Q1。婴儿在哪个时间尺度的社会互动环境中接受了哪个模态的什么线索？Q2。婴儿如何管理线索，在时间尺度内/跨时间尺度与环境互动？本文提出了一种基于幼儿与照料者日常互动中韵律一致性的多尺度分析框架。该框架分析了来自Tseltal语料库的全天音频数据。结果显示，婴儿和照顾者的发声在每个时间尺度上的协调是不同的。此外，在类似的收集条件下，对具有音频数据的加拿大-英语语料库进行了相同的分析。结果显示，母亲的韵律一致性出现在英语中，而不是Tseltal语中，而婴儿对照顾者的韵律一致性很弱，但在不同文化中都相似。有趣的是，与加拿大人相比，加拿大人更有可能在更长的互动序列中表现出韵律一致性的增加。基于这些结果的会议论文和海报分别在（Li， J, et al., ICDL 2022）和（Li， J, et al., SRCD 2023）上发表。目前的研究结果强调，婴儿在全球、中等和局部尺度上从环境中获得不同的听觉线索（Q1）。此外，婴儿的行为也不同，在不同的时间尺度上与这些线索相对应。(Q2)

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)