Infants are capable of recognizing vowel-like sounds and prefer to hear these sounds vocalized by other babies, research has found."What we did in this study was that we created vowel sounds that sounded like a 6-month-old speaking and also a female adult speaking," explained lead author Linda Polka, PhD, at her presentation shared by the Acoustical Society of America. "We then presented them to infants to see if they had a preference to listen to one type of sound to the other."
In earlier studies, the subjects were 4- to 5-month-old infants who are not yet in the babbling stage and are not yet vocally active. The infants, seated on their mother's laps, were positioned in front of a screen with a checkerboard pattern. When the babies look at the checkerboard, a sound plays and when they look away it stops. The researchers found out that the subjects spent more time listening to the vocalizations of the infant speaker than to the female adult.
Polka’s team explored why infants prefer to listen to vowel sounds made by other infants. They conducted two follow-up sub-experiments that aimed to answer whether the preference was associated to high voice pitch, which is similar to the infants' mothers', or to the sound's similarities with their own vocal production capabilities.
In another experiment, the researchers only used infant voice resonance without a high voice pitch. Results showed the same preference with the initial experiment. In a third experiment, the researchers matched the vocal pitch of the infant sound with the adult female sound. “We didn't get the same results because the high pitch was very interesting to them," explained Polka. Results of experiment three showed that infant voice pitch was also potent and that infant pitch with formants was not more attractive than pitch alone.
The researchers conducted another set of experiments (experiments four, five, and six) with 7-month-old infants, who are in the babbling stage. Results showed that infants have a strong preference for infant vowel sounds.
Asked about what inspired the study, Polka told The Hearing Journal: "We started this research with a motivated to learn about how infants perceive their own speech, which is critical for them to learn to talk and produce intelligible spoken language Although infants must accurately process infant speech signals to become an intelligible talker, until now, research had not involved infant speech signals because we did not have a way to create well-controlled recordings of infant speech to use in scientific studies."
"The impact of our findings is a richer understanding of how access to infant speech impacts infant development,” she added. “Our findings show that normally developing infants have a strong attraction to infant speech and this seems to make speech processing easier for them. This finding may show – with further research – that this perceptual bias is a positive indicator or milestone in normal language development and that absence of this perceptual bias indicates that a child is at risk for language learning difficulties."
Polka collaborated with Lucie Ménard, a linguistics professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal and an expert in speech production, and Matthew Masapollo, a doctoral student.
Asked about what inspired the study, Polka told The Hearing Journal: "We started this research with a motivated to learn about how infants perceive their own speech, which is critical for them to learn to talk and produce intelligible spoken language Although infants must accurately process infant speech signals to become an intelligible talker, until now, research had not involved infant speech signals because we did not have a way to create well-controlled recordings of infant speech to use in scientific studies."
"The impact of our findings is a richer understanding of how access to infant speech impacts infant development,” she added. “Our findings show that normally developing infants have a strong attraction to infant speech and this seems to make speech processing easier for them. This finding may show – with further research – that this perceptual bias is a positive indicator or milestone in normal language development and that absence of this perceptual bias indicates that a child is at risk for language learning difficulties."
Polka collaborated with Lucie Ménard, a linguistics professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal and an expert in speech production, and Matthew Masapollo, a doctoral student.
Published: 5/14/2018 4:07:00 PM
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