Infants’ Mapping of New Faces to New Voices

Abstract

The ability to identify individuals by voice is fundamental for communication. However, little is known about the expectations that infants hold when learning unfamiliar voices. Here, the voice-learning skills of 4-and 8month-olds (N = 53; 29 girls, 14 boys of various ethnicities) were tested using a preferential-looking task that involved audiovisual stimuli of their mothers and other unfamiliar women. Findings reveal that the expectation that novel voices map on to novel faces emerges between 4 and 8 months of age, and that infants can retain learning of face-voice pairings via nonostensive cues by 8 months of age. This study provides new insights about infants' use of disambiguation and fast mapping in early voice learning.We thank members of our research team, including S. Nijeboer and J. Cloake for their assistance in study co-ordination, K. Chen, L. Ruiz, and C. Shum for their assistance in running the study, and members of the Infant Studies Centre for the helpful discussions. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2019-0306) to Janet F. Werker, and a Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Nature et Technologies postdoctoral fellowship to Adriel John Orena.

Disjunctive inference in preverbal infants

“…'s critique) and based our paradigm on infants' social abilities. From 3 months on, infants can associate a voice to a face ( Jordan and Brannon, 2006 ; Bahrick, et al., 2005 ; Brookes et al., 2001 ), and they apply a mutual exclusivity principle robustly after 8 months of age: i.e., when they already know a face-voice pair, they associate a new voice to a new face ( Orena and Werker, 2021 ). Therefore, we hypothesized that it might be possible to create an ambiguous situation if two faces were presented while a voice was speaking.…”

Object labeling and disambiguation in 4‐month‐old infants

“…In contrast, younger infants' looking behavior is determined by visual familiarity or novelty (Halberda, 2003; Mather & Plunkett, 2010). However, more recent studies have shown that 8‐month‐old infants can disambiguate the face of a novel voice when the familiar face and voice are highly familiar and belong to the infant's mother (Orena & Werker, 2021). This suggests that the classical disambiguation experiments (Halberda, 2003; Mather & Plunkett, 2010) may have underestimated infants' ability to disambiguate novel words by relying on words learned before coming to the laboratory, possibly by overestimating which words younger infants may already know and how well they know them.…”

Learning to Recognize Unfamiliar Voices: An Online Study With 12- and 24-Month-Olds

“…Based on previous work ( Orena and Werker, 2021 ), we preset the critical WoA to be 367 ms after the critical utterance (9,367–11,367 ms). Note that the WoA was offset by 367 ms as this is the reported duration of time needed for infants to initiate an eye movement after hearing speech sounds ( Swingley, 2012 ).…”

“…From an early age, humans are surprisingly adept at tracking highly familiar voices. Previous studies have reported that upon hearing their mother’s voice (and relative to hearing an unfamiliar woman’s voice), fetuses’ heart rate increased ( Hepper et al, 1993 ; Kisilevsky et al, 2003 ), newborns preferentially sucked on a pacifier in a non-nutritive sucking procedure ( DeCasper and Fifer, 1980 ), and 4-month-olds looked toward their mother (live: Spelke and Owsley, 1979 ; photograph: Orena and Werker, 2021 ). Infants can also differentiate between their father’s voice and an unfamiliar male voice ( DeCasper and Fifer 1980 ; Ward and Cooper, 1999 ).…”