Early Attention to Animacy: Change-Detection in 11-Month-Olds

Hofrichter, Ruth; Siddiqui, Hasan; Morrisey, Marcus Neil; Rutherford, M. D.

doi:10.1177/14747049211028220

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Both toys were animate, with faces. Equating animacy across the two pictures is important, as young children show a strong bias for animate objects (e.g., Hofrichter et al., 2021). The pairing of words and objects was counterbalanced across participants.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental change in English‐learning children's interpretations of salient pitch contours in word learning

Quam,

Swingley

2024

Infancy

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To efficiently recognize words, children learning an intonational language like English should avoid interpreting pitch‐contour variation as signaling lexical contrast, despite the relevance of pitch at other levels of structure. Thus far, the developmental time‐course with which English‐learning children rule out pitch as a contrastive feature has been incompletely characterized. Prior studies have tested diverse lexical contrasts and have not tested beyond 30 months. To specify the developmental trajectory over a broader age range, we extended a prior study (Quam & Swingley, 2010), in which 30‐month‐olds and adults disregarded pitch changes, but attended to vowel changes, in newly learned words. Using the same phonological contrasts, we tested 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds, 24‐month‐olds, and 18‐month‐olds. The older two groups were tested using the language‐guided‐looking method. The oldest group attended to vowels but not pitch. Surprisingly, 24‐month‐olds ignored not just pitch but sometimes vowels as well—conflicting with prior findings of phonological constraint at 24 months. The youngest group was tested using the Switch habituation method, half with additional phonetic variability in training. Eighteen‐month‐olds learned both pitch‐contrasted and vowel‐contrasted words, whether or not additional variability was present. Thus, native‐language phonological constraint was not evidenced prior to 30 months (Quam & Swingley, 2010). We contextualize our findings within other recent work in this area.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental change in English‐learning children's interpretations of salient pitch contours in word learning

Quam,

Swingley

2024

Infancy

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“…Animate entities inherently attract more attention than inanimate ones (e.g., [ 26 ]) suggesting a greater effort in marking them. In Russian, for example, an increase in prosodic prominence on animate referents as compared to inanimate ones has been found [ 27 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boosting or inhibiting - how semantic-pragmatic and syntactic cues affect prosodic prominence relations in German

Baumann,

Lorenzen

2024

PLoS ONE

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In this exploratory study, we investigate the influence of several semantic-pragmatic and syntactic factors on prosodic prominence production in German, namely referential and lexical newness/givenness, grammatical role, and position of a referential target word within a sentence. Especially in terms of the probabilistic distribution of accent status (nuclear, prenuclear, deaccentuation) we find evidence for an additive influence of the discourse-related and syntactic cues, with lexical newness and initial sentence position showing the strongest boosting effects on a target word’s prosodic prominence. The relative strength of the initial position is found in nearly all prosodic factors investigated, both discrete (such as the choice of accent type) and gradient (e.g., scaling of the Tonal Center of Gravity and intensity). Nevertheless, the differentiation of prominence relations is information-structurally less important in the beginning of an utterance than near the end: The prominence of the final object relative to the surrounding elements, especially the verbal component, is decisive for the interpretation of the sentence. Thus, it seems that a speaker adjusts locally important prominence relations (object vs. verb in sentence-final position) in addition to a more global, rhythmically determined distribution of prosodic prominences across an utterance.

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“…Furthermore, infants attend differently to the interaction between two human actors compared to an interaction between a human actor and an inanimate object [ 3 ]. Animate entities also immediately attract our visual attention [ 1 , 4 ]. For instance, when presented with two natural scenes, one including an animal, adults initiate a saccade to the scene with the animal in as little as 120 milliseconds [ 5 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic

Dolscheid,

Schlenter,

Penke

2024

PLoS ONE

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Animacy plays a key role for human cognition, which is also reflected in the way humans process language. However, while experiments on sentence processing show reliable effects of animacy on word order and grammatical function assignment, effects of animacy on conjoined noun phrases (e.g., fish and shoe vs. shoe and fish) have yielded inconsistent results. In the present study, we tested the possibility that effects of animacy are outranked by reading and writing habits. We examined adult speakers of German (left-to-right script) and speakers of Arabic (right-to-left script), as well as German preschool children who do not yet know how to read and write. Participants were tested in a picture naming task that presented an animate and an inanimate entity next to one another. On half of the trials, the animate entity was located on the left and, on the other half, it was located on the right side of the screen. We found that adult German and Arabic speakers differed in their order of naming. Whereas German speakers were much more likely to mention the animate entity first when it was presented on the left than on the right, a reverse tendency was observed for speakers of Arabic. Thus, in literate adults, the ordering of conjoined noun phrases was influenced by reading and writing habits rather than by the animacy status of an entity. By contrast, pre-literate children preferred to start their utterances with the animate entity regardless of position, suggesting that effects of animacy in adults have been overwritten by effects of literacy.

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Early Attention to Animacy: Change-Detection in 11-Month-Olds

Cited by 5 publications

References 31 publications

Developmental change in English‐learning children's interpretations of salient pitch contours in word learning

Developmental change in English‐learning children's interpretations of salient pitch contours in word learning

Boosting or inhibiting - how semantic-pragmatic and syntactic cues affect prosodic prominence relations in German

Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic

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