Infants' Ability to Match Dynamic Phonetic and Gender Information in the Face and Voice

Patterson, Michelle; Werker, Janet F.

doi:10.1006/jecp.2001.2644

Cited by 105 publications

(121 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…As a result, we predicted that young infants would match monkey faces and voices, but that older infants would not. This finding would differ markedly from previous findings showing that infants can match human faces and voices as early as 2 months of age and as late as 12 months of age (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8).…”

contrasting

confidence: 99%

“…However, given the nature of the methodology, this was impractical: infants typically do not tolerate more than the four test trials in a testing session. Also, a large body of evidence shows clearly that human infants as young as 2 months of age and as old as 12 months of age can make intraspecies (human face-voice) intersensory matches in the same kind of task used here (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8). Thus, it is unlikely that the subjects used in the current study would be exceptional in this capacity.…”

mentioning

confidence: 83%

“…In order for them to have veridical and meaningful social experiences with such people, infants must be able to integrate particular faces and voices by detecting their correspondences. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that, beginning as early as 2 months of age, infants begin to exhibit the ability to perceive face-voice correspondences (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8). Despite this fact, however, the developmental process underlying intersensory integration of faces and voices, as well as more general intersensory processes, remain poorly understood.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

Lewkowicz

Ghazanfar

2006

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

141

175

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Between 6 and 10 months of age, infants become better at discriminating among native voices and human faces and worse at discriminating among nonnative voices and other species' faces. We tested whether these unisensory perceptual narrowing effects reflect a general ontogenetic feature of perceptual systems by testing across sensory modalities. We showed pairs of monkey faces producing two different vocalizations to 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-month-old infants and asked whether they would prefer to look at the corresponding face when they heard one of the two vocalizations. Only the two youngest groups exhibited intersensory matching, indicating that perceptual narrowing is pan-sensory and a fundamental feature of perceptual development.crossmodal ͉ face processing ͉ multisensory F rom the moment of birth, infants find themselves in a socially rich environment where they see and hear other people. In order for them to have veridical and meaningful social experiences with such people, infants must be able to integrate particular faces and voices by detecting their correspondences. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that, beginning as early as 2 months of age, infants begin to exhibit the ability to perceive face-voice correspondences (1-8). Despite this fact, however, the developmental process underlying intersensory integration of faces and voices, as well as more general intersensory processes, remain poorly understood. Current theoretical views assume either that basic intersensory perceptual abilities are present at birth and become increasingly differentiated and refined over age (9) or that such abilities are not present at birth and only emerge gradually during the first years of life as a result of the child's active exploration of the world (10, 11).Most empirical evidence supports the former, differentiation, view in showing that basic intersensory perceptual abilities are already present in infancy and that as infants grow these abilities change and improve in significant ways (12, 13). For example, young human infants can perceive lower-order intersensory relations based on such attributes as intensity (14), temporal synchrony (15, 16), and duration (17), but do not integrate auditory and visual spatial cues (18). In contrast, older infants can perceive higher-order intersensory relations based on such attributes as affect (6) and gender (3), become capable of learning arbitrary intersensory associations (19) and can integrate auditory and visual spatial cues (18). Findings from studies of underlying neural mechanisms of intersensory integration in cats and rhesus monkeys show a similar pattern. Whereas multisensory cells in the superior colliculus of adult cats and rhesus monkeys integrate auditory and visual cues in spatial localization tasks, these cells do not integrate them in neonatal cats and monkeys (20,21). Together, extant findings suggest a general developmental pattern consisting of the initial emergence of low-level intersensory abilities, a subsequent agedependent refinement and improvement ...

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confidence: 83%

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confidence: 99%

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The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

Lewkowicz

Ghazanfar

2006

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

141

175

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“…It is known that prelinguistic infants are sensitive to several visual correlates of speech, such as audiovisual synchrony (see, e.g., Dodd, 1979), gender correspondence (Patterson & Werker, 2002), and even segmental correspondence between sounds (vocalic and consonantal) and gestures (see, e.g., Burnham & Dodd, 2004;Desjardins, Rogers, & Werker, 1997;Desjardins & Werker, 2004;Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982Patterson & Werker, 1999, 2002. It will be interesting to address whether or not infants are also sensitive to language information and, if so, what use they can make of it to facilitate language acquisition in bilingual environments (for preliminary evidence, see Weikum et al, 2004).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discriminating languages by speech-reading

Soto‐Faraco

Navarra

Weikum

et al. 2007

Perception & Psychophysics

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“…Previous research shows that infants successfully extract matching information between auditory and visual stimuli from sequential presentations of stimuli (42,43). When presented with audiovisual stimuli, infants tend to look longer at matching displays (27,34,(44)(45)(46). We predicted that if infants identified the sources of vocalizations, they would look longer when the vocalizations and faces matched.…”

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confidence: 90%

Five-month-old infants' identification of the sources of vocalizations

Vouloumanos

Druhen

Hauser

et al. 2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Humans speak, monkeys grunt, and ducks quack. How do we come to know which vocalizations animals produce? Here we explore this question by asking whether young infants expect humans, but not other animals, to produce speech, and further, whether infants have similarly restricted expectations about the sources of vocalizations produced by other species. Five-month-old infants matched speech, but not human nonspeech vocalizations, specifically to humans, looking longer at static human faces when human speech was played than when either rhesus monkey or duck calls were played. They also matched monkey calls to monkey faces, looking longer at static rhesus monkey faces when rhesus monkey calls were played than when either human speech or duck calls were played. However, infants failed to match duck vocalizations to duck faces, even though infants likely have more experience with ducks than monkeys. Results show that by 5 months of age, human infants generate expectations about the sources of some vocalizations, mapping human faces to speech and rhesus faces to rhesus calls. Infants' matching capacity does not appear to be based on a simple associative mechanism or restricted to their specific experiences. We discuss these findings in terms of how infants may achieve such competence, as well as its specificity and relevance to acquiring language.cognitive development ͉ language acquisition ͉ speech perception ͉ conspecific ͉ evolution H umans' intuitive understanding of physical aspects of the world, such as object identity, continuity, and motion, has its roots in infancy. Carey (1) proposed that children's intuitive understanding of biology is built on their intuitive understanding of psychology, beginning with an understanding of human behavior which is then generalized along a similarity gradient to other animals. Others, such as Keil (2) and Hatano (3), have argued that biology is its own privileged domain of knowledge with dedicated inferential mechanisms. Whichever account is correct, an understanding of the biology of different species requires an understanding of differing properties of those species. Many studies (e.g., 4-6) have shown that infants use visible properties to distinguish between instances of different categories (e.g., dogs vs. cats), but ultimately, categories function to support inferences about unseen properties (7,8). We investigate what infants might know or infer about the kinds of vocalizations that different species produce.The vocalizations that animals produce are often species specific: distinctive and functional in providing information about individual and group identity, motivational state, location, and often the triggering contexts (9-13). At the same time, vocalizations contain information about the vocal tract that produced them, effectively functioning as a species-specific signature (14-16). The recognition of vocalizations is especially important because they can help identify and localize conspecifics, predators, and prey, even when those organisms may not be within the ...

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Infants' Ability to Match Dynamic Phonetic and Gender Information in the Face and Voice

Cited by 105 publications

References 31 publications

The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

Discriminating languages by speech-reading

Five-month-old infants' identification of the sources of vocalizations

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