When depressed mothers talk to their babies, their speech lacks many of the familiar characteristics of "baby talk" and may consequently hamper their children's ability to learn language and other skills.
Researchers have found a significant difference in associative learning between infants who listened to voice samples from women who were depressed and women who were not.
"We found that depressed mothers who were trying to interest their infants in a toy - a stuffed gorilla - said the word 'gorilla' in a voice with relatively flat pitch. This raised the possibility that infants, who are known to react more strongly to speech high in pitch modulation, would not learn well about the world around them when prompted with speech uttered by depressed caregivers," said Peter S. Kaplan, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Denver. This may help to explain why older children of depressed mothers frequently perform more poorly than other children on standard tests of child development.
Kaplan, along with Jo-Anne Bachorowski of Vanderbilt University and Patricia Zarlengo-Strouse of the University of Colorado at Denver, reported their findings in the current issue of Child Development.
In their study of 225 four month olds, the researchers examined "associative learning, a basic and ubiquitous form of learning in infants." During a series of trials, the infants heard a woman say, "Pet the gorilla," and then saw a smiling woman's face. Later, to test if infants had learned to associate the voice and face, the researchers tracked how much time infants spent looking at a newly introduced checkerboard pattern while the voice played.
Infants who heard women with low or moderate symptoms of depression spent
significantly more time observing the checkerboard pattern compared with
those who listened to severely depressed women. Prior research had shown
that when the voice had not predicted the appearance of the face, it did not
increa
'"/>
Contact: Peter S. Kaplan
pkaplan@carbon.cudenver.edu
303-556-2601
Center for the Advancement of Health
21-May-1999