Some Issues in Infant Speech Perception: Do the Means Justify the Ends?

Weitzman, Raymond S.

doi:10.1007/bf03393043

“…This study and other studies (e.g., Pons, Lewkowicz, Soto-Faraco, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2009;Seidl, Cristià, Bernard, & Onishi, 2009) support the concept of perceptual narrowing, where experience (or lack of experience) with a particular language shapes the perceptual abilities of the developing brain (Maurer & Werker, 2014). Despite the prevalent use of this paradigm with infants, it should be noted that the stimuli in this paradigm can be interpreted as attention holders and not discriminative stimuli, thus bringing into question the theoretical conclusions that have been drawn from experiments using this paradigm (Weitzman, 2007).…”

Section: Communicationmentioning

confidence: 44%

Out of the Mouth of Babes: Lessons from Research on Human Infants

Kuczaj¹,

Lilley²

2016

AB&C

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Marine mammal behavior and cognition researchers often face a number of challenges, including the research subjects' lack of interest and verbal abilities, as well as choosing a paradigm with appropriate stimuli for the subjects' perceptual and cognitive abilities. Researchers who work with human infants often encounter similar challenges when studying infant cognition and have developed strategies to overcome these challenges, including using stimuli that capture the infants' attention, determining what tasks are age-appropriate, and using conditioned responses to test discrimination abilities. This paper encourages marine mammal researchers to learn from the research paradigms and techniques used in human infant research and alter them appropriately for the intended study subjects. The conditioned head-turn response, Violation-of-Expectation paradigm, and the help/hinder paradigm have all been used in infant cognition research and show great promise for furthering the current understanding of marine mammal behavior and cognition. In addition, studying a subject's spontaneous behavior can provide valuable insight in areas such as problem solving skills, creativity, and individual differences. Care must be taken to adapt the paradigms and use stimuli to fit each species' perceptual abilities. For example, avoiding a task that requires color discrimination for species that do not possess color vision or using stimuli that fall within a particular species' hearing range are necessary steps in designing an ecologically valid and informative study. Adapting paradigms previously used with human infants can help expand the current understanding of marine mammal communication, cognitive abilities, and social behavior.

show abstract

“…The uncertainty regarding the direction of preference that infants show is certainly not a new issue in infant research (e.g., Aslin, 2007;Hunter & Ames, 1988), and it has even been brought up in an extensive critique of the seminal infant phonotactic learning study (Weitzman, 2007). Although all infant researchers that use such preferential looking time methods are well aware of the fact that sometimes novelty and sometimes familiarity ensues, the assumption is that these flips can be explained by scientifically-relevant factors.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Cristià¹

2016

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

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

Cristià

¹

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Some Issues in Infant Speech Perception: Do the Means Justify the Ends?

Cited by 4 publications

References 11 publications

Out of the Mouth of Babes: Lessons from Research on Human Infants

Out of the Mouth of Babes: Lessons from Research on Human Infants

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

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

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About