Infants' response to the audible and visible properties of the human face: II. Discrimination of differences between singing and adult- directed speech

Journal/Book: Dev Psychobiol. 1998; 32: 261-74.

Abstract: Human infants' responsiveness to the audible and visible features of human faces was studied by habituating them to a person speaking a prepared script in an adult-directed manner and then administering a series of separate test trials where a person could be seen, heard, or seen and heard singing. When habituated to a female person speaking in an adult-directed manner and tested with a singing female 4, 6, and 8- month-old infants responded to the audible, visible, and bimodal changes, whereas 3-month-old infants only responded to the visual and bimodal changes. In contrast, when habituated to a male person speaking in an adult-directed manner and tested with a singing female, all age groups discriminated all three types of changes. These findings demonstrate that infants are responsive to differences between low- and high-prosody content inherent in both the facial and vocal characteristics of the human face and that, whereas responsiveness to the visible and bimodal features associated with differences between adult-directed speech and singing is present as early as 3 months of age, responsiveness to the audible features emerges between 3 and 4 months of age depending on whether gender differences are present as well.

Keyword(s): Acoustic Stimulation. Age Factors. Attention/physiology. Child Development/physiology. Discrimination (Psychology)/physiology. Face. Female. Fixation, Ocular/physiology. Habituation (Psychophysiology)/physiology. Human. Infant. Infant Behavior/physiology. Male. Multivariate Analysis. Music/psychology. Pattern Recognition, Visual/physiology. Photic Stimulation. Sex Factors. Single-Blind Method. Speech Perception/physiology. Support, Non-U.S. Gov't. Time Factors. Voice

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