Thesis (Ph. D. in Psychology)--Vanderbilt University, May 2008. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Background: To this date most studies have been focused on the influence of clinical depression and psychotic reactions during the postnatal period on mother-infant interaction, therefore this study examined the effects of maternal depressive mood in the postnatal period on mother-infant verbal and non-verbal communication. Method: Seventy two mother-infant dyads participated in the study. Eighteen infants of mothers with depressive mood and 18 controls were seen when they were 6 months old; and eighteen infants of mothers with depressive mood and 18 controls were seen when they were 10 months old. The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) was used as a mean to assess maternal depressive mood. Tactile, verbal, and gaze behaviours of mothers and their infants when playing face-to-face during pleasure- and surprise-eliciting situations were coded using micro-analytic techniques. The behaviours of infants of mothers with symptoms of depression were also coded during interactions with a female unfamiliar adult (stranger) during a pleasure-eliciting situation. Results: The patterns of communication in non-depressed mother-infant dyads were appropriate to infants’ developmental age. However, maternal symptoms of depression as outlined by the EPDS appeared to somewhat hinder mothers’ ability to attend to infants’ developmental needs and communicate appropriately through touch, speech, and gaze; as well as infants’ capacity for positive emotional regulation, exploration of the toy, and gaze directed to their mothers during play interactions. Conclusions: These results suggest that maternal depressive mood is potentially a risk factor for difficulties in mother-infant communication during the first year postpartum. The mothers’ mood state and their infants’ age influence the type, frequency, and duration of touch, speech, and gaze during early interactions. Such findings are discussed considering a bi-directional influence in the development of communicative responses between mothers and infants across time.

This research project is about infant-observation, that is looking at, observing, and studying parent-infant interactions and relationships within the first year of life. The principle intention of the study is to illustrate and shed light upon human infant development and how the newborn becomes a fully functioning member within the family. The study provides a context in which to consider parent-infant interaction beginning in utero, expanding to the birthing process, and continuing through the infant's first year. It focuses on specific themes of parent-infant interaction. The following situations are explored: the role of the mother; the mother as a container; the infant's experience of containment; the internalisation of experience; the symbolic meaning of food; dealing with distress and the development of concrete communication; the growth of a sense of ego; and, the infant's internal world. The study concludes by addressing various implications for further psychotherapy and compares the therapist-client relationship to the mother-infant relationship. The research outlines one particular psychoanalytic theoretical orientation of mental and emotional development. It is a model derived predominantly from The Developmental School Theorists and Object Relations Theorists, namely, Bowlby, Klein, Mahler and Winnicott. This model looks at the infant's earliest relationships and the processes these set up within the infant's developing mind. Infant observation, asa research method proposed by Bick and Sidoli, links method and theory, and serves as the methodological approach utilised in the present study. A video, based on the parent-infant interaction of three families, provides observational data and may be viewed in conjunction with this research. / KMBT_363 / Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in

Speech perception plays an important role in how infants begin to produce speech. This study aims to understand how changes in infant selective attention to various parts of talking faces guides their understanding of speech and subsequent production. In this study, we tracked infant (4-12 months of age) and adult gaze patterns to determine where on a face they attend, when hearing and seeing the face speak in either their native (English) or a non-native language (Spanish). We also tracked infant selective attention to moving-silent and silent-static faces, to determine if this would result in different patterns of attention. The findings suggest that there are two shifts in infant attention. The first shift occurs between four and eight months of age, with infants shifting their eyes to the mouth of the talking face. The second shift occurs around twelve months of age, when infants begin to return their gaze back to the eye region when hearing and seeing their native language, but continue to attend to the mouth region when hearing and seeing the non-native language. Overall, the results of this study suggest that changes in selective attention to talking faces guides the development of speech production and is dependent on early language experience. / by Amy H. Tift. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

From syllables to fluent speech, it is important for infants to quickly learn and decipher linguistic information. To do this, infants must not only use their auditory perception but also their visual perception to understand speech and language as a multisensory coherent event. Previous research by Lewkowicz and Hansen-Tift (2012) demonstrated that infants shift their allocation of visual attention from the eyes to the mouth of the speaker's face throughout development as they become interested in speech production. This project examined how infants, from 4-14-months of age, allocate their visual attention to increasingly complex speech tasks. In Experiment 1, infants were presented with upright and inverted faces vocalizing syllables and the results demonstrated that in response to the upright faces, 4-month-old infants attended to the eyes and 8- and 10-month-olds attended equally to the eyes and mouth. In response to the inverted face presentation, both the 4- and 10-month-olds attended equally to the eyes and mouth but the 8-month olds attended to the eyes. In Experiment 2, infants were presented with a phoneme matching task (Patterson & Werker, 1999, 2002, 2003) and the results demonstrated that the 4-month-old infants successfully matched the voice to the corresponding face, but that older infants did not. Measures of their selective attention to this task showed that the 4-month-old infants attended more to the eyes of the faces during the task, not attending to the redundant speech information at the mouth, but older infants attended equally to the eyes and mouth, although they did not match the voice to the face. Experiment 3 presented infants with a fluent speech matching task (Lewkowicz et al., 2015) which demonstrated that although the infants (12-14-months) did not systematically match the voice to the corresponding face, the infants attended more to the mouth region, which would have provided them with the neces sary redundant information. Overall, these studies demonstrate that there are developmental changes in how infants distribute their visual attention to faces as they learn about speech and that the complexity of the speech is a critical factor in how they allocate their visual attention. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection