Christopher Cox

Infant Vocal Development & Infant-Directed Speech

How do infants learn to produce stable vocalisations, and how does the speech directed to them shape that process? My work combines acoustic modelling with cross-linguistic and meta-analytic evidence to understand the development of early vocal communication.

Social Interactions & Turn-Taking

What governs the temporal coordination of conversational turns, in typical development, in autism, and across species? I study turn-taking as a core building block of social cognition, with implications for theoretical accounts of social interaction.

Bayesian Methods in Developmental Science

Developmental data are noisy, sparse, and structured. I use Bayesian modelling and meta-analysis to draw cumulative inferences across studies and to quantify uncertainty in ways that match the messiness of real infant behaviour.

Parenting & Parental Leave

How does the structure of parental leave shape caregivers’ daily lives, mobility, and well-being? Using GPS tracking, longitudinal designs, and emotion-dynamic models, my work investigates how leave-taking patterns relate to depression symptoms, spatial restriction, and affective regulation in new mothers and fathers.

Cox, C., Ravignani, A., Sørensen, S., Zamm, A., Jensen, F. H., Bryant, G. A., Cristia, A., & Fusaroli, R. (2026). Breaking the Taxonomic Barrier: A Systematic Review of Formal Models of Communicative Coordination Across Species. Preprint, PsyArXiv.

Ekström, A., Lameira, A., Cox, C., & Moran, S. (2026). Great ape consonant-like calls: Honing in on hominid articulatory continuity. Preprint, PsyArXiv.

Cox, C., Værbak, N., & Parsons, C. (2026). Associations between Depression Symptoms and Spatial Restriction in Fathers and Mothers on Parental Leave: a GPS Tracking Study. Preprint, PsyArXiv.

Cox, C., Værbak, N., Brams, P. H., & Parsons, C. (2025). Following, Balancing, or Self-Regulating? Parental Leave-Dependent Emotion Dynamics in New Mothers and Fathers. Preprint, PsyArXiv.

Cox*, C., Fusaroli, R., Nielsen, Y. A., Cho, S., Rocca, R., Simonsen, A., Knox, A., Lyons, M., Liberman, M., Cieri, C., Schillinger, S., Lee, A. L., Hauptmann, A., Tena, K., Chatham, C., Miller, J. S., Pandey, J., Russell, A. S., Schultz, R. T., & Parish‐Morris, J. (2025). Social Context Matters for Turn-Taking Dynamics: A Comparative Study of Autistic and Typically Developing Children. Cognitive Science, 49(10), e70124.

Fusaroli, R., Cox*, C., Weed, E., Szabó, B. I., Fein, D., & Naigles, L. (2025). The development of turn-taking skills in typical development and autism. Cognitive Science, 49(7), e70082.

Cox, C., & Vihman, M. M. (2024). The Emergence of Stability in Infant Vocal Production: A Model Based on Acoustic Analysis. Proceedings from FONETIK 2024, Stockholm, June 3–5, 2024, 117–122.

Zettersten*, M., Cox*, C. M. M., Bergmann*, C., Tsui, A., Soderstrom, M., Mayor, J., Lundwall, R. A., Lewis, M., Kosie, J., Kartushina, N., Fusaroli, R., Frank, M., Byers-Heinlein, K., Black, A., & Mathur, M. (2024). Evidence for infant-directed speech preference is consistent across large-scale, multi-site replication and meta-analysis. Open Mind, 8, 439–461.

Cox, C., Templeton, E., & Fusaroli, R. (2023). Fine-Tuning Social Timing: From Non-Human to Human Animals and Back. A Commentary on “The Evolution of Social Timing”. Physics of Life Reviews, 47.

Cox, C., Dideriksen, C., Keren-Portnoy, T., Roepstorff, A., Christiansen, M. H., & Fusaroli, R. (2023). Infant-directed speech does not always involve exaggerated vowel distinctions: Evidence from Danish. Child Development, 94(6), 1672–1696.

Cox, C., Bergmann, C., Fowler, E., Keren-Portnoy, T., Roepstorff, A., Bryant, G., & Fusaroli, R. (2023). A Systematic Review and Bayesian Meta-Analysis of the Acoustic Features of Infant-Directed Speech. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(1), 114–133.

Nguyen, V.*, Versyp, O.*, Cox*, C. M. M., & Fusaroli, R. (2022). A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis of the development of turn-taking in adult–child vocal interactions. Child Development, 93(4), 1181–1200.

Cox, C. M. M., Keren-Portnoy, T., Roepstorff, A., & Fusaroli, R. (2022). A Bayesian meta-analysis of infants’ ability to perceive audio-visual congruence for speech. Infancy, 27(1), 67–96.

Keren-Portnoy, T., Daffern, H., DePaolis, R. A., Cox, C. , Brown, K. I., Oxley, F. A., & Kanaan, M. (2021). “Did I just do that?” — Six-month-olds learn the contingency between their vocalizations and a visual reward in 5 minutes. Infancy, 26(6), 1057–1075.

ManyBabies Consortium. (2020). Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed-speech preference. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(1), 24–52.

Phonetics & Phonology

An introduction to articulatory and acoustic phonetics, the phonology of natural languages, and the methods used to analyse speech sounds, with examples drawn from typologically diverse languages.

Language Acquisition

How children come to acquire phonology, words, and grammar, drawing on classic developmental findings and contemporary computational and statistical approaches.

Systematic Reviews & Cumulative Science

How to design and conduct systematic reviews and meta-analyses, with a focus on how cumulative evidence is built — and where it breaks down — in cognitive and developmental science.

Human-Computer Interaction

Guest lectures on the cognitive and communicative dimensions of human-computer interaction.

Data Simulation & Power Analysis

Designed and delivered for the ManyBabies international consortium of developmental science labs. Conceived through my work on the Teaching, Training, and Open Science committee. Workshop materials →

Aarhus University & University of York

Supervisors: Riccardo Fusaroli, Tamar Keren-Portnoy, Andreas Roepstorff

How Social Contingency Shapes Early Child-Caregiver Interactions

University of York

Dissertation with Marilyn May Vihman