The cocktail party effect in infants

Author(s): Jusczyk, P. W.

Journal/Book: Percept Psychophys. 1996; 58: 1710 Fortview Rd, Austin, TX 78704. Psychonomic Soc Inc. 1145-1156.

Abstract: Most speech research with infants occurs in quiet laboratory rooms with no outside distractions. However, in the seal world, speech directed to infants often occurs in the presence of other competing acoustic signals. To learn language, infants need to attend to their caregiver's speech even under less than ideal listening conditions. We examined 7.5-month-old infants' abilities to selectively attend to a female talker's voice when a male voice was talking simultaneously. In three experiments, infants heard a target voice repeating isolated words while a distracter voice spoke fluently at one of three different intensities. Subsequently, infants heard passages produced by the target voice containing either the familiar words or novel words. Infants listened longer to the familiar words when the target voice 10 dB or 5 dB more intense than the distracter, but not when the two voices were equally intense. In a fourth experiment, the assignment of words and passages to the familiarization and testing phases was reversed so that the passages and distracters were presented simultaneously during familiarization, and the infants were tested on the familiar and unfamiliar isolated words. During familiarization, the pas sages were 10 dB more intense than the distracters. The results suggest that this may be at the limits of what infants at this age can do in separating two different streams of speech In conclusion, infants have some capacity to extract information from speech even in the face of a competing acoustic voice.

Note: Article RS Newman, SUNY Buffalo, Dept Psychol, Pk Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 USA

Keyword(s): SPEECH-SOUND DISCRIMINATION; CONCURRENT VOWELS; NATIVE LANGUAGE; PERCEPTION; THRESHOLDS; PATTERNS; NOISE; SENSITIVITY; HEARING; ADULTS

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