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A Longitudinal Characterization of Typical Laughter Development in Mother–Child Interaction from 12 to 36 Months: Formal Features and Reciprocal Responsiveness

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Abstract

Laughter is a valuable means for communicating and engaging in interaction since the earliest months of life. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of work on how its use develops in early interactions—given its putative reflexive nature, it has often been disregarded from studies on pre-linguistic vocalizations. We provide a longitudinal characterization of laughter use analyzing interactions of 4 babies with their mothers at five time-points (12, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months). We show how child laughter is very distinct from mothers’ (and adults’ generally), in terms of frequency, duration, level of arousal displayed, overlap with speech, and responsiveness to others’ laughter. Notably, contrary to what might be expected, we observed that children laugh significantly less than their mothers, especially at the first time-points analyzed. We indeed observe an increasing developmental trajectory in the production of laughter overall and in the contingent multimodal response to mothers’ laughter, showing the child’s increasing attunement to the social environment, interest in others’ appraisals and mental states, and awareness of its communicative value. We also show how mothers’ contingent responses to child laughter change over time, going from high-frequency mimicry, to a lower rate of diversified multimodal responses, in line with the child’s neuro-psychological development. Our data support a dynamic view of dialogue where interactants influence each other bidirectionally and emphasizes the crucial communicative value of laughter. When language is not fully developed, laughter might be an early means, in its already fully available expressiveness, to hold the conversational turn and enable meaningful vocal contribution in interaction at the same level of the interlocutor. Our study aims to provide a benchmark for typical laughter development, since we believe it can be an early means, along with other commonly analyzed behaviors (e.g., smiling, gazing, pointing, etc.), to gain insight into early child neuro-psychological development.

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Availability of Data and Materials

The videos annotated for the current work are all publicly available on the CHILDES database at https://phonbank.talkbank.org/access/Eng-NA/Providence.html. Our full annotation dataset, all indexed videoclips referred to throughout the manuscript, and materials related to the statistical analysis are available at: https://osf.io/48fmd/?view_only=a3bcf69ab71f43fdac820b1e46c6e5de.

Code Availability

The R scripts used for the statistical analysis are available at https://osf.io/48fmd/?view_only=a3bcf69ab71f43fdac820b1e46c6e5de.

Notes

  1. In the current paper, by the term mimicry we mean the production of a behavior shortly after the partner that is type identical in certain dimensions, as used in Mayo and Gordon (2020) and El Haddad et al. (2019), and reviewed in Chartrand and Lakin (2013).

  2. We excluded Ethan from our study because he was later diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and no videos were available for annotation; Violet was excluded arbitrarily, without having looked at her data, simply because we were aiming at a gender-balanced corpus (two female subjects and two male subjects).

  3. Choosing to use the Providence Corpus entails that we miss the earliest laughter episodes, which occur between the 3rd and 4th month of life (; Sroufe & Wunsch, 1972; Nwokah et al., 1994).

  4. For these two reasons we were forced on two occasions (Lily and Naima at time-point 5: 36 months) to integrate the analysis of the originally selected video with the temporally closest other video available, and sum the duration of minutes and laughs analysed (see Table 6). We selected the videos closest to our age of interest, but an important exception was made for Alex: the first video, which we analyze as related to the first time-point (12 months), was actually recorded at 16 months of age (the time when his parents reported he had a vocabulary of about 4 words).

  5. A detailed analysis of the annotations related to the objects of laughter and its pragmatic functions will be reported in a forthcoming work.

  6. Annotations and data are available at https://osf.io/48fmd/?view_only=a3bcf69ab71f43fdac820b1e46c6e5de.

  7. In the current work we consider children and mothers as two groups, leaving to a future work scrutiny over individual variabilities.

  8. The R scripts used raw annotations and data are available at https://osf.io/48fmd/?view_only=a3bcf69ab71f43fdac820b1e46c6e5de.

  9. The overall count of laughs in the corpus is based on the number of laughs identified by the first annotator.

  10. In Krippendorff (2012, p. 241) cut-off values of acceptability are proposed to guide a value interpretation, as rules of thumb: a ≥ 0.8 is considered as a reliable degree of agreement, while a ≥ 0.66 is considered as an acceptable value for tentative conclusions.

  11. A mixed-effect logistic model was not a viable option given the limited amount of data available.

  12. Only two laughs had a duration lower than 0.5 s, and they were not from the same video. There is, therefore, no possibility that two laughs occurred in the same window.

  13. The operationalization chosen is aimed at maximizing the informativity of our data, given the limited sample size.

  14. We acknowledge that the arousal annotation had a rather low degree of inter-annotator agreement and that our current analysis is based on the annotation agreed upon after discussion between annotators. Our results on this score, therefore, need to be viewed with caution.

  15. We decided to perform a McNemar’s Chi-squared test since it is a good non-parametric alternative to the Pearson’s Chi-squared test, and is a better fit for small paired nominal data samples (2 × 2 contingency table) compared to the Fisher’s Exact Test.

  16. For the analysis of duration, given the availability of sufficiently many data points (287 laughs), we chose to use ANOVA since it is a robust test for comparing a continuous variable such as duration among two groups and three conditions and testing their interaction.

  17. See footnote 15 for a justification of our choice.

  18. We performed a Fisher’s exact test, since it is a good alternative to Chi-square tests when dealing with small sample size. We could not perform a McNemar’s test, even though it would have been a more suitable option for paired data, since it can be applied only for 2 × 2 contingency tables (therefore viable for the 2 × 2 comparison between mothers and children overall, but not for the 2 × 5 comparison of speech laughter production over time for each participant).

  19. In the class antiphonal laughter, we include both laughter with no overlap (reciprocal in Nwokah et al., 1994) and those resulting in overlap (coactive in Nwokah et al., 1994).

  20. The choice to collapse points of observation was motivated by the fact that having a relatively small sample size considering each time-point independently would have resulted in a weak statistical reliability.

  21. This test was used here since it is a viable non-parametric alternative (appropriate for our data) to the paired Student’s t-test.

  22. We need to acknowledge again that the arousal annotation had a rather low degree of inter-annotator agreement and that our current analysis is based on the annotation agreed upon after discussion between annotators.

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Acknowledgements

We owe heartfelt thanks to Yair Haendler for his help in the statistical analysis and to Véronique Pouillon and Dina Ginzburg for their help with interannotator agreement. We also would like to thank Andy Lucking, Mitja Nikolaus and Kevin El Haddad for their comments on a previous version of this paper. This work, carried out within the Labex BLRI (ANR-11-LABX-0036) and the Institut Convergence ILCB (ANR-16-CONV-0002), has benefited from support from the French government, managed by the French National Agency for Research (ANR) and the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University (A*MIDEX).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Parole et Langage (UMR 7309), CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France

    Chiara Mazzocconi

  2. Institute Language Communication and the Brain, Aix-en-Provence, France

    Chiara Mazzocconi

  3. Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (UMR 7110), CNRS, Université de Paris, Paris, France

    Jonathan Ginzburg

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  1. Chiara Mazzocconi
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Both authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data analysis were performed by Chiara Mazzocconi. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Chiara Mazzocconi. Jonathan Ginzburg contributed to reviewing, commenting and editing on previous versions of the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Appendices

Appendix A: Video Analyzed Details

The MLU (in morphemes) values reported are calculated over the full length of the videos partially annotated for laughter. These were computed using the MLU program in CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000). We excluded from the MLU calculation words that were unintelligible using the formula MLU +t*CHI –t%mor –syy -sxx @ for children and MLU +t*MOT –t%mor–syy -sxx @ for the mothers. We see that the children all have typical language development, with Naima standing out for her faster language development (Table 6).

Table 6 Information about videos analyzed—age, mean length of utterance, video-links, and transcripts
Full size table

Appendix B: Laughter Annotation Protocol

Laughter Annotation Guidelines

Laughter Tier

  • Modality: audio and visual (facial expressions, head movement, body movements)

  • Criteria: laughter should differ from smile by the fact it contains either a body movement, a head movement or audible laughter related sounds.

  • Values: Laughter (L) or Speech-laughter (SL)

    • Laughter: Standalone laughter, i.e. laughter not overlapping with speech from the laugher her/himself

    • Speech-laughter: Laughter which overlaps with speech from the laugher her/himself.[When one speaks and laughs at the same time!]

  • Details:

  • Laughter: The segments start when an audio, facial expression or body movement event related to laughter is observed and stops when a breath intake is perceived whether audibly or visually (from the stomach, face, head, etc.). The breath intake is considered part of the laugh. If no breath intake is perceived the end of the segment is considered to be when the movement stops. In some cases breath intake sounds occurs after a relatively long delay. In this case, during this delay, if the participant is perceived as laughing than the breath intake marks the end of the laugh and is part of it. Otherwise the end of the laughter is the end of the sound or movement.

  • Speech-Laughter: The segments start when the laughter starts to happen and ends either with a breath intake sound or when the movement or sound ends. Speech-laughs can be as short as one vowel/consonant (30 ms) or as long as full sentences.

Arousal/Intensity Laughter Tier

  • Modality: audio and visual (facial expressions, head movement, body movements)

  • Values: low, medium, high

  • The arousal of the laughs are annotated subjectively based on the annotator’s perception.

  • !! Laughter level of arousal/intensity do not correspond to acoustic intensity! There can be silent laughs very high on arousal!!

Alignment Tier

  • Modality: audio and visual (facial expressions, head movement, body movements)

  • Values: Isolated (i), Antiphonal (A), Coactive onset (C)

    • Isolated: The laugh is not preceded by any other laugh from the partner (within 1 sec).

    • Antiphonal: A laugh that start shortly after the onset of the partner's laughter and within 1 sec after the partner’s laughter offset.

    • Coactive Onset: The interactants start laughing with the same onset time (considered same onset if the distance between the 2 laughs is less than 100 ms).

Response to Other’s Laughter Tier

  • Modality: audio and visual (facial expressions, head movement, body movements)

  • Every time a laughter is identified, look/listen at the multi-modal reaction from the partner.

  • Values: Explicit, Implicit, None, No_vis

    • Explicit: the partner responds to the laughter with a Laughter him/her self, a Smile, an orienting Look, an Exclamation or with a Clarification Request.

    • Implicit: after the laughter the partner just continues with her/his activity, e.g. child is singing and looking at the mother, the mother laughs, and the child continues singing and looking at the mother.

    • None: no orienting attention behavior can be observed, neither continuation of activity.

    • No_vis: the multimodal reaction is not visible, either because the participant is giving the back to the camera or is off-camera.

Appendix C: Supplemental Examples Extracted from the Providence Corpus (Demuth et al., 2006)

  1. (13)

    Example from Providence Corpus—Naima 010014 (263–267)—Mother laughter mimicry

    Mum: ring around the rosies

    Mum: a pocket full of posies

    Mum: ashes, ashes

    Mum: we all go down

    Child: <laughter/>

    Mum: <laughter/>

  1. (14)

    Example from Providence Corpus—Alex 030103 (398–401)—Child laughter mimicry

    Child: No this one!

    Mum: Alright! Can I use the pen?

    Child: No! [screaming]

    Mum: <laughter> Stop it! </laughter>

    Child: <laughter/>

    Mum: Stop that screaming!

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Mazzocconi, C., Ginzburg, J. A Longitudinal Characterization of Typical Laughter Development in Mother–Child Interaction from 12 to 36 Months: Formal Features and Reciprocal Responsiveness. J Nonverbal Behav 46, 327–362 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-022-00403-8

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