Journal Article


Limited evidence of test-retest reliability in infant-directed speech preference in a large preregistered infant experiment

Abstract

Test-retest reliability — establishing that measurements remain consistent across multiple testing sessions — is critical to measuring, understanding, and predicting individual differences in infant language development. However, previous attempts to establish measurement reliability in infant speech perception tasks are limited, and reliability of frequently-used infant measures is largely unknown. The current study investigated the test-retest reliability of infants’ preference for infant-directed speech over adult-directed speech in a large sample (N=158) in the context of the ManyBabies1 collaborative research project (Frank et al., 2017; ManyBabies Consortium, 2020). Labs were asked to bring in participating infants for a second appointment retesting infants on their preference for infant-directed speech. This approach allowed us to estimate test-retest reliability across three different methods used to investigate preferential listening in infancy: the head-turn preference procedure, central fixation, and eye-tracking. Overall, we found no consistent evidence of test-retest reliability in measures of infants’ speech preference (overall r = .09, 95% CI [-.06,.25]). While increasing the number of trials that infants needed to contribute for inclusion in the analysis revealed a numeric growth in test-retest reliability, it also considerably reduced the study’s effective sample size. Therefore, future research on infant development should take into account that not all experimental measures may be appropriate for assessing individual differences between infants.

Attached files

Authors

Schreiner, Melanie S.
Zettersten, Martin
Bergmann, Christina
Frank, Michael C.
Fritzsche, Tom
Gonzalez-Gomez, Nayeli
Hamlin, Kiley
Kartushina, Natalia
Kellier, Danielle J
Mani, Nivedita
Mayor, Julien
Saffran, Jenny
Shukla, Mohinish
Silverstein, Priya
Soderstrom, Melanie
Lippold, Matthias

Oxford Brookes departments

Department of Psychology, Health and Professional Development

Dates

Year of publication: 2024
Date of RADAR deposit: 2024-07-03


Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License


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