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

Orena, Adriel John; Mader, Asia Sotera; Werker, Janet F.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.874411

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Furthermore, as several studies have suggested that using face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to additional challenges for children, impacting speech understanding and also speech production, it is also reasonable that this factor impacted PA development. Indeed, educators, teachers, and researchers have raised concerns regarding the adverse impact that the use of face masks has on the healthy development of children's social lives, their interactions with others, the growth of language and communication skills, including sound recognition and vocal self-perception, as well as the development of speech skills (Goldin et al, 2020;Wolfe et al, 2020;Atcherson et al, 2021;Green et al, 2021;Lipps et al, 2021;Swaminathan and Meera, 2021;Thibodeau et al, 2021;Frota et al, 2022Frota et al, , 2023Lalonde et al, 2022;Maftei et al, 2022;Mitsven et al, 2022;Orena et al, 2022;Ribeiro et al, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on pre-reading skills among Portuguese children

Filipe,

Frota

2023

Front. Educ.

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IntroductionAlthough it could be expected that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted preschool children’s abilities associated with later reading skills, research has not yet addressed the topic. Our study focused on the impact of the pandemic on phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) abilities that have been shown to reliably predict later reading skills.MethodsA cohort of 82 typically developing European Portuguese children (mean age = 64.5 months, SD = 3.47), enrolled in their last year of preschool and dramatically affected by COVID-19 lockdowns, were assessed for PA and RAN skills.ResultsCompared to pre-pandemic normative data, our findings revealed lower average scores on the PA subtest (t = −10.85; p < 0.001; d = 1.62) and comparable average scores on the RAN task. A year later, the same group of children still exhibited lower scores on PA skills (t = 2.87; p = 0.005; d = 0.41). Furthermore, their word reading performance was also below the expected according to the normative pre-pandemic dataset (t = −2.69; p = 0.008; d = 0.29). A further comparison between the preschoolers affected by the pandemic and a post-pandemic cohort from the same school setting (N = 25; mean age = 72.08 months, SD = 3.30) highlighted that the pandemic cohort had lower PA average scores than their post-pandemic peers (t = 12.27; p < 0.001; d = 2.66).DiscussionThese findings underscore the enduring impact of disrupted learning environments on pre-reading abilities among preschoolers. Consequently, they contribute to further the understanding of the effects of the pandemic on the learning progress of young children.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on pre-reading skills among Portuguese children

Filipe,

Frota

2023

Front. Educ.

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“…This makes it difficult to determine whether infants have truly learned the specific audiovisual characteristics of each speaker, or if the face-voice matching is based on gender. Conclusive evidence of infants associating faces and voices of unfamiliar speakers of the same gender is not found until 24 months of age ( Orena et al, 2022 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who spoke that language? Assessing early face-language associations in monolingual and bilingual infants

Marcet,

Birulés,

Bosch

et al. 2024

Front. Psychol.

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IntroductionIn bilingual communities, knowing the language each speaker uses may support language separation and, later, guide language use in a context-appropriate manner. Previous research has shown that infants begin to form primary associations between the face and the language used by a speaker around the age of 3 months. However, there is still a limited understanding of how robust these associations are and whether they are influenced by the linguistic background of the infant. To answer these questions, this study explores monolingual and bilingual infants’ ability to form face-language associations throughout the first year of life.MethodsA group of 4-, 6-, and 10-month-old Spanish and/or Catalan monolingual and bilingual infants were tested in an eye-tracking preferential-looking paradigm (N = 156). After the infants were familiarized with videos of a Catalan and a Spanish speaker, they were tested in two types of test trials with different task demands. First, a Silent test trial assessed primary face-language associations by measuring infants’ visual preference for the speakers based on the language they had previously used. Then, two Language test trials assessed more robust face-language associations by measuring infants’ ability to match the face of each speaker with their corresponding language.ResultsWhen measuring primary face-language associations, both monolingual and bilingual infants exhibited language-based preferences according to their specific exposure to the languages. Interestingly, this preference varied with age, with a transition from an initial familiarity preference to a novelty preference in older infants. Four-month-old infants showed a preference for the speaker who used their native/dominant language, while 10-month-old infants preferred the speaker who used their non-native/non-dominant language. When measuring more robust face-language associations, infants did not demonstrate signs of consistently matching the faces of the speakers with the language they had previously used, regardless of age or linguistic background.DiscussionOverall, the results indicate that while both monolingual and bilingual infants before the first year of life can form primary face-language associations, these associations remain fragile as infants seemed unable to maintain them when tested in a more demanding task.

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“…It was observed that wearing a face mask did not affect face-to-face mother-infant interaction during a free-play session in 5–19-month-old infants (Tronick and Snidman, 2021 ). However, masking has been shown to affect recognition of unfamiliar voices and their mapping to faces: 12-month-old infants were not able to recognize an unfamiliar speaker's voices when faces were partially occluded, unlike 24-month-old infants (Orena et al, In Press ). Moreover, face masks have been shown to degrade speech understanding in children, namely consonant recognition, similarly to adults (Lalonde et al, In Press ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To summarize, recent studies have suggested that changes in everyday activities during the pandemic might affect language development (Davies et al, 2021 ; Deoni et al, 2021 ). The use of face masks, in particular, and related changes in the visual/acoustic speech cues, might alter certain aspects of speech processing, such as voice recognition, word recognition, and consonant recognition (Singh et al, 2021 ; Lalonde et al, In Press ; Orena et al, In Press ). However, developmental research is still in need to understand whether and when these potential effects take place during the early development, specifically, whether pandemic-related changes, namely, usage of face masks, affect infants' speech processing during the 1st year of life.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Word Segmentation Behind the Mask

et al. 2022

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Infants have been shown to rely both on auditory and visual cues when processing speech. We investigated the impact of COVID-related changes, in particular of face masks, in early word segmentation abilities. Following up on our previous study demonstrating that, by 4 months, infants already segmented targets presented auditorily at utterance-edge position, and, using the same visual familiarization paradigm, 7–9-month-old infants performed an auditory and an audiovisual word segmentation experiment in two conditions: without and with an FFP2 face mask. Analysis of acoustic and visual cues showed changes in face-masked speech affecting the amount, weight, and location of cues. Utterance-edge position displayed more salient cues than utterance-medial position, but the cues were attenuated in face-masked speech. Results revealed no evidence for segmentation, not even at edge position, regardless of mask condition and auditory or visual speech presentation. However, in the audiovisual experiment, infants attended more to the screen during the test trials when familiarized with without mask speech. Also, the infants attended more to the mouth and less to the eyes in without mask than with mask. In addition, evidence for an advantage of the utterance-edge position in emerging segmentation abilities was found. Thus, audiovisual information provided some support to developing word segmentation. We compared 7–9-monthers segmentation ability observed in the Butler and Frota pre-COVID study with the current auditory without mask data. Mean looking time for edge was significantly higher than unfamiliar in the pre-COVID study only. Measures of cognitive and language development obtained with the CSBS scales showed that the infants of the current study scored significantly lower than the same-age infants from the CSBS (pre-COVID) normative data. Our results suggest an overall effect of the pandemic on early segmentation abilities and language development, calling for longitudinal studies to determine how development proceeds.

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

Cited by 5 publications

References 34 publications

Exploring the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on pre-reading skills among Portuguese children

Exploring the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on pre-reading skills among Portuguese children

Who spoke that language? Assessing early face-language associations in monolingual and bilingual infants

Early Word Segmentation Behind the Mask

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