Natural Observation of Early Social Interactions in Infants in Vanuatu
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Infant-directed speech (IDS) has been shown to play a key role in language development. Previous research, however, has also shown significant variability across societies in terms of how often IDS occurs. Here, we ask whether infant-directed communication (IDC)— which includes both IDS and other non-verbal infant-directed behaviours supporting social and communicative development, has a different balance of verbal and non-verbal communication in Tanna compared to what is seen in the wider literature. We examine video observations of 22 one-year olds to identify the non-verbal features of IDC that occur across cultures. First, we will measure and analyze the proportions of the observed times for IDC dimensions— i.e., speech, action, gesture, emotion, and touch, while parents engage with infants, via a linear mixed effects model. Next, we will compare our findings on these dimensions in Vanuatu to what has been reported in Western societies. Consistent with previous studies, we expect to observe less IDS in Tanna than what is typically observed in the literature. Critically, we also expect to see more non-verbal communicative modification compared to verbal communicative modification. The present work is the first to examine the non-verbal features of IDC in a non-Western society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".