Week 3 Flashcards
How to observe infant perception in general:
-test newborns
What type of experiment?
- put newborn in baby carrier
- artificial nipple supported by rod connected to computer
- measure how strongly they are sucking for 2 minutes (high amplitude sucking)
- find a personal baseline
- once the baseline has been established, the period of familiarization begins
- baby gets to hear a sound as a reward for sucking
- boredom –> habituation (sucking rate diminishes)
- novelty –> dishabituation (notice something new, become interested again, sucking rate increases)
Describe the experiment about observing infant perception.What were the results?
-4-day-old infants
-monolingual French babies
-sentences recorded in French and Russian
(Mehler et al., 1988)
- 4 day old infants
- from monolingual french homes
- want to know if the babies can tell the difference between French and Russian (sentences recorded in both)
- 10 infants French-French
- 10 infants French-Russian
- 10 infants Russian-French
- 10 infants Russian-Russian
- babies noticed the difference
What are some factors to control for in the experiment about observing infant perception?
(Mehler et al., 1988)
-same voice, emotional content–> neutral content, length and loudness of sentences, fluent bilingual speaker shouldn’t know the purpose of the recordings
What were the results for the experiment about observing infant perception in infants listening to two languages that they had never heard before?
-no dishabituation at all
How did they change the observing infant perception experiment with american babies? What were the results when american babies listened to english and italian recordings?
- baby comes into lab with parent who is going to wear headphones so they aren’t able to cue their child
- picture appears and audio plays at the same time
- baby looks and hears sound
- measures how long they are looking in that direction
- eventually they get habituated and look away
What were the results when French babies listened to low-pass filtered French & Russian recordings?
- low-pass filter: crop out any info above 400hertz (pitch frequency) so only low frequency sounds are getting inside
- pitch, timing of pitch peaks (prosody)
- low-pass filter was enough for them to discriminate
What were the results when American babies listened to low-pass filtered English & Italian recordings?
-10 week olds can distinguish it
How do children discriminate between languages?
-rhythmic class: stress timed vs. syllable timed vs. mora timed
What rhythmic class is english?
stress timed
What rhythmic class is french?
syllable timed (each syllable is roughly equally timed)
What rhythmic class is Japanese?
mora timed (long syllables have 2 or more moras)
Why could american babies (0;5) discriminate American english from british english but not Dutch from German.
-british english is higher in pitch so that might have influenced them
Describe the experiment with infant perception in bilingual babies.
(Byers-Heinlein et al., 2010)
- 3 sets of newborns
- monolingual English (control group) (stressed timed)
- Tagalog-English bilingual (syllable timed)
- Chinese-English bilingual (syllable timed)
- high amplitude sucking, preference
- if you get a zero preference score: you sucked equally for both languages (maybe they like them equally or they don’t know that they are different)
What were the results of the experiment with infant perception in bilingual babies?
(Byers-Heinlein et al., 2010)
- monolingual babies prefer English to Tagalog (no experience with tagalog)
- bilingual English-Tagalog babies have an equal preference for English to Tagalog (experience with both)
- bilingual English-Chinese babies do prefer English over Tagalog (no experience with Tagalog) but their preference is not as strong as the monolingual babies’
- In other words their “dispreference” for Tagalog is not as strong because they have experience with Chinese, which is also syllable-timed like Tagalog
- yes, they can discriminate between two languages
Explain the babies’ listening preference 1 experiment and results.
(Mehler et al., 1978)
- infants 0;1
- high amplitude sucking
- preference not discrimination
- infants performed more HA sucks to mother’s voice than to stranger’s voice
