Preference for Infant-Directed Speech in the First Month after Birth

Cooper, Robin Panneton; Aslin, Richard Ν.

doi:10.2307/1130766

Cited by 622 publications

(354 citation statements)

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“…It is well known that by 4 months of age infants show a preference for IDS when compared to ADS (Cooper, Abraham, Berman, & Staska, 1997;Cooper & Aslin, 1990Pegg, Werker, & McLeod, 1992). However, it has also been shown that during the second half of the first year of life developmental changes take place in infant preferences for IDS (Newman & Hussain, 2006;Hayashi, Tamekawa, & Kiritani, 2001).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: A crosslinguistic comparison

et al. 2014

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a b s t r a c tPrevious studies have described the existence of a phonotactic bias called the Labial-Coronal (LC) bias, corresponding to a tendency to produce more words beginning with a labial consonant followed by a coronal consonant (i.e. ''bat'') than the opposite CL pattern (i.e. ''tap''). This bias has initially been interpreted in terms of articulatory constraints of the human speech production system. However, more recently, it has been suggested that this presumably language-general LC bias in production might be accompanied by LC and CL biases in perception, acquired in infancy on the basis of the properties of the linguistic input. The present study investigates the origins of these perceptual biases, testing infants learning Japanese, a language that has been claimed to possess more CL than LC sequences, and comparing them with infants learning French, a language showing a clear LC bias in its lexicon. First, a corpus analysis of Japanese IDS and ADS revealed the existence of an overall LC bias, except for plosive sequences in ADS, which show a CL bias across counts. Second, speech preference experiments showed a perceptual preference for CL over LC plosive sequences (all recorded by a Japanese speaker) in 13-but not in 7-and 10-month-old Japanese-learning infants (Experiment 1), while revealing the emergence of an LC preference between 7 and 10 months in French-learning infants, using the exact same stimuli. These crosslinguistic behavioral differences, obtained with the same stimuli, thus reflect differences in processing in two populations of infants, which can be linked to differences in the properties of the lexicons of their respective native languages. These findings establish that the emergence of a CL/LC bias is related to exposure to a linguistic input.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: A crosslinguistic comparison

et al. 2014

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“…Depressed mothers do not modify their speaking style (43,44) to produce the exaggerated "motherese" that infants prefer (45)(46)(47)(48), and which can highlight speech sound differences (49). Newborns of depressed mothers fail to show face/voice preference (22) whereas older infants do not learn as well from their mothers' infant-directed speech (50).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception

Weikum

Oberlander

Hensch

et al. 2012

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

172

107

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Language acquisition reflects a complex interplay between biology and early experience. Psychotropic medication exposure has been shown to alter neural plasticity and shift sensitive periods in perceptual development. Notably, serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) are antidepressant agents increasingly prescribed to manage antenatal mood disorders, and depressed maternal mood per se during pregnancy impacts infant behavior, also raising concerns about long-term consequences following such developmental exposure. We studied whether infants' language development is altered by prenatal exposure to SRIs and whether such effects differ from exposure to maternal mood disturbances. Infants from non-SRI-treated mothers with little or no depression (control), depressed but non-SRI-treated (depressed-only), and depressed and treated with an SRI (SRI-exposed) were studied at 36 wk gestation (while still in utero) on a consonant and vowel discrimination task and at 6 and 10 mo of age on a nonnative speech and visual language discrimination task. Whereas the control infants responded as expected (success at 6 mo and failure at 10 mo) the SRI-exposed infants failed to discriminate the language differences at either age and the depressed-only infants succeeded at 10 mo instead of 6 mo. Fetuses at 36 wk gestation in the control condition performed as expected, with a response on vowel but not consonant discrimination, whereas the SRI-exposed fetuses showed accelerated perceptual development by discriminating both vowels and consonants. Thus, prenatal depressed maternal mood and SRI exposure were found to shift developmental milestones bidirectionally on infant speech perception tasks.L anguage, our most quintessential human characteristic, involves a complex interplay between biology and experience. At birth, infants possess an initial preparedness for language and a developmental readiness that supports learning any of the world's languages (1-3), yet also already show privileged processing to the native language from prenatal listening experience (4-6). During the following weeks and months of life, infants become progressively attuned to the properties of their native language, including its rhythmical and segmental (e.g., consonant) information (reviewed in refs. 7 and 8). The high degree of regularity in the timing of sequential tuning to properties of the native language suggests a series of critical or sensitive periods, i.e., points in development when the system is maximally influenced by input.The timing of onset of these sensitive periods seems to be maturationally constrained. Infants born 3 mo preterm attune to the phonetic properties (9) of their native language at the same gestational age as full-term infants, not according to the number of months of postnatal listening experience. Such maturational constraints can protect development: ensuring the optimal consecutive stabilization of the perceptual components that contribute in a step-wise fashion to language acquisition (10). However, it is known from research i...

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“…Similar preferences also may be found in the auditory domain. Newborns prefer not only human voices to other sounds (24), and speech to nonspeech stimuli (25), but they are also biased toward the specific intonation patterns (i.e., infantdirected speech) that indicate that they are the ones who are addressed by an utterance (26).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Newborns' preference for face-relevant stimuli: Effects of contrast polarity

Farroni

Johnson²,

Menon³

et al. 2005

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

400

349

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There is currently no agreement as to how specific or general are the mechanisms underlying newborns' face preferences. We address this issue by manipulating the contrast polarity of schematic and naturalistic face-related images and assessing the preferences of newborns. We find that for both schematic and naturalistic face images, the contrast polarity is important. Newborns did not show a preference for an upright face-related image unless it was composed of darker areas around the eyes and mouth. This result is consistent with either sensitivity to the shadowed areas of a face with overhead (natural) illumination and͞or to the detection of eye contact.eye contact ͉ face processing

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Preference for Infant-Directed Speech in the First Month after Birth

Cited by 622 publications

References 0 publications

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: A crosslinguistic comparison

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: A crosslinguistic comparison

Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception

Newborns' preference for face-relevant stimuli: Effects of contrast polarity

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