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Mother-Infant Interactions in Marmosets: Parallel Clinical Findings in Human Speech Disorders
Stephen Camarata, PhD
Professor, Hearing & Speech Sciences; Psychiatry
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Professor, Special Education
Peabody College-Vanderbilt University
Recently, there been a number of studies indicating that mothers’ input shapes vocal development in infant marmosets beyond what is expected from simple maturation (Takahashi, Liao & Ghazanfar 2018). These results have yielded a preliminary primate model of how mother-infant interaction shapes “speech” development. Independent of this, our laboratory at Vanderbilt University Medical School has been studying how clinician-patient interaction wherein a child's immature speech vocalization is immediately followed by a more advanced clinician (or parent) model leads to improvements in speech production in these patients. This presentation will include a review of the recent mother-infant marmoset results and a description of results from children with speech disorders, Down syndrome, and autism parallel the primate findings (Yoder, Camarata & Woynaroski, 2016). In addition, potential next steps in discovery will be suggested and discussed.
Takahashi, D. Y., Liao, D. A., & Ghazanfar, A. A. (2017). Vocal learning via social reinforcement by infant marmoset monkeys. Current Biology, 27(12), 1844-1852.
Yoder, P. J., Camarata, S., & Woynaroski, T. (2016). Treating speech comprehensibility in students with Down syndrome. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 59(3), 446-459