Infants' Recognition of the Sound Patterns of Their Own Names

Mandel, Denise R.; Jusczyk, Peter W.; Pisoni, David B.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1995.tb00517.x

Cited by 293 publications

(190 citation statements)

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“…Indeed, published evidence indicates that sensitivity to native phonotactics is not evident before 9 months of age, relatively late when compared to some other levels that may be resolved holistically (e.g., own name recognition, as in Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995, word-object mapping for highly frequent and salient referents, as in Tincoff & Jusczyk, 1999). Interestingly, some research suggests that native phonotactics is more sensitive to length of exposure than maturation (Gonzalez-Gomez & Nazzi, 2012).…”

Section: Theoretical Implications For Phonological Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can infants learn phonology in the lab? A meta-analytic answer

Cristià

2018

Cognition

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Two of the key tasks facing the language-learning infant lie at the level of phonology: establishing which sounds are contrastive in the native inventory, and determining what their possible syllabic positions and permissible combinations (phonotactics) are. In 2002-2003, two theoretical proposals, one bearing on how infants can learn sounds (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002) and the other on phonotactics (K. E. Chambers, Onishi, & Fisher, 2003), were put forward on the pages of Cognition, each supported by two laboratory experiments, wherein a group of infants was briefly exposed to a set of pseudo-words, and plausible phonological generalizations were tested in a subsequent phase. These two papers have received considerable attention from the general scientific community, and inspired a flurry of follow-up work. In the context of questions regarding the replicability of psychological science, the present work uses a meta-analytic approach to appraise extant empirical evidence for infant phonological learning in the laboratory. It is found that neither seminal finding (on learning sounds and learning phonotactics) holds up when close methodological replications are integrated, although less close methodological replications do provide some evidence in favor of the sound learning strand of work. Implications for authors and readers of this literature are drawn out. It would be desirable that additional mechanisms for phonological learning be explored, and that future infant laboratory work should employ paradigms that rely on constrained and unambiguous links between experimental exposure and measured infant behavior.

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Section: Theoretical Implications For Phonological Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can infants learn phonology in the lab? A meta-analytic answer

Cristià

2018

Cognition

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confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, the inclusion of words such as the child's own name and Mommy and Daddy in speech has been shown to facilitate the segmentation of neighboring words by establishing word boundaries for young learners (Bortfeld, Morgan, Golinkoff, & Rathbun, 2005). Finally, in terms of their listening preferences, infants have an attentional bias to such words, preferring to listen to their own names compared with stress-matched foils as early as 4.5 months (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995).Collectively, these findings suggest a privileged status attached to such words in tasks that measure segmentation of neighboring words, mapping words to meaning, and infants' allocation of attention. This study seeks to determine whether these words are also privileged in how infants cope with variability in speech.…”

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confidence: 99%

Overcoming the Effects of Variation in Infant Speech Segmentation: Influences of Word Familiarity

Singh

Nestor

Bortfeld³

2008

Infancy

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Previous studies have shown that 7.5-month-olds can track and encode words in fluent speech, but they fail to equate instances of a word that contrast in talker gender, vocal affect, and fundamental frequency. By 10.5 months, they succeed at generalizing across such variability, marking a clear transition period during which infants' word recognition skills become qualitatively more mature. Here we explore the role of word familiarity in this critical transition and, in particular, whether words that occur frequently in a child's listening environment (i.e., "Mommy" and "Daddy") are more easily recognized when they differ in surface characteristics than those that infants have not previously encountered (termed nonwords). Results demonstrate that words are segmented from continuous speech in a more linguistically mature fashion than nonwords at 7.5 months, but at 10.5 months, both words and nonwords are segmented in a relatively mature fashion. These findings suggest that early word recognition is facilitated in cases where infants have had significant exposure to items, but at later stages, infants are able to segment items regardless of their presumed familiarity.To master their native language, young learners must translate words they encounter into meaning. Although the mechanisms that permit word learning remain unclear, children begin to successfully learn words at a very early age, with word comprehension beginning as early as 10 months (Benedict, 1979) and a productive vocabulary shortly thereafter (Nelson, 1973). This process might appear uncomplicated, given how effortlessly infants appear to learn words, but there are quite weighty demands that they must meet before word learning can begin. Two of the most widely documented challenges a young learner confronts are the segmentation and variability problems. Segmentation refers to the fact that speech unravels as a continuous stream without convenient pauses inserted between words, making it incumbent on listeners to partition the signal appropriately (Jusczyk, 1997; van de Weijer, 1998). Variability refers to the fact that human speech contains acoustic information that does not signal linguistic distinctions. How our systems converge on constancy from inordinate variability remains a mystery in every domain of perception. In the domain of speech, learners must compose a finite phonetic and lexical inventory from a complex stream of input that varies substantially and, therefore, unpredictably.Infants' capacities to resolve the segmentation and variability problems have been investigated over the last 10 years. In a seminal study, Jusczyk and Aslin (1995) Correspondence should be addressed to Leher Singh, Department of Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences, Boston University, 635 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215. leher@bu.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptInfancy. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 November 16. (Barker & Newman, 2004;Houston & Jusczyk, 2000; Jusczyk & Hohne, 1997) have shown that infants retain memories of wo...

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“…The ability to recognize a talker begins in utero (Hepper, Scott, & Shahidullah, 1993) and develops rapidly throughout infancy and childhood (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980;Jusczyk, Hohne, Jusczyk, & Redanz, 1993;Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995), reaching adult levels of proficiency by age 10 (Mann, Diamond, & Carey, 1979). …”

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confidence: 99%

Learning to recognize talkers from natural, sinewave, and reversed speech samples.

Sheffert

Pisoni

Fellowes

et al. 2002

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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109

100

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In 5 experiments, the authors investigated how listeners learn to recognize unfamiliar talkers and how experience with specific utterances generalizes to novel instances. Listeners were trained over several days to identify 10 talkers from natural, sinewave, or reversed speech sentences. The sinewave signals preserved phonetic and some suprasegmental properties while eliminating natural vocal quality. In contrast, the reversed speech signals preserved vocal quality while distorting temporally based phonetic properties. The training results indicate that listeners learned to identify talkers even from acoustic signals lacking natural vocal quality. Generalization performance varied across the different signals and depended on the salience of phonetic information. The results suggest similarities in the phonetic attributes underlying talker recognition and phonetic perception.When a talker produces an utterance, the listener simultaneously apprehends the linguistic form of the message as well as the nonlinguistic attributes of the talker's unique vocal anatomy and pronunciation habits. Anatomical and stylistic differences in articulation convey an array of personal or indexical qualities, such as personal identity, sex, approximate age, ethnicity, personality, intentions or emotional state, level of alcohol intoxication, and facial expression (see Bricker

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Infants' Recognition of the Sound Patterns of Their Own Names

Cited by 293 publications

References 20 publications

Can infants learn phonology in the lab? A meta-analytic answer

Can infants learn phonology in the lab? A meta-analytic answer

Overcoming the Effects of Variation in Infant Speech Segmentation: Influences of Word Familiarity

Learning to recognize talkers from natural, sinewave, and reversed speech samples.

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