# Individual Differences in Infants' Speech Segmentation Performance: The Role of Mother‐Infant Cardiac Synchrony

## TL;DR

This study shows that heart rate synchronization between mothers and infants is linked to better word recognition skills in 9-month-olds.

## Contribution

The study introduces cardiac synchrony as a biological marker for early language development in infants.

## Key findings

- Higher dyadic coupling of RSA was associated with better word segmentation performance in infants.
- Cardiac synchrony correlated with maternal sensitivity to infants' mental states.
- Infant positive affect did not influence cardiac synchrony or word segmentation.

## Abstract

Caregiver‐infant coregulation is an early form of communication. This study investigated whether mother‐infant biological coregulation is associated with 9‐month‐olds’ word segmentation performance, a crucial milestone predicting language development. We hypothesized that coregulation would relate with infants' word segmentation performance. Additionally, we examined whether this relationship is influenced by the caregiving environment (i.e., parental reflective functioning) and the infant's emotional state (i.e., positive affect). Coregulation was investigated via cardiac synchrony in 28 nine‐month‐old infants (16 females) during a 5‐min free‐play with their German‐speaking mothers. Cardiac synchrony was measured through Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), employing Recurrence Quantification Analysis to evaluate dyadic coupling (i.e., Recurrence Rate) and dyadic predictability (i.e., Entropy). Infants' word segmentation was measured with an eye‐tracking central‐fixation procedure. A stepwise regression revealed that higher dyadic coupling, but not predictability, of the dyads' RSA was associated with infants looking longer toward the screen when listening to novel as compared to familiar test words, indicating advanced word segmentation performance (Cohen's d = 0.25). Moreover, cardiac synchrony correlated positively with maternal sensitivity to their infant's mental states, but not with the infant's positive affect. These results suggest that caregiver‐infant biological coregulation may play a foundational role in language acquisition.