Categorization of Infant-Directed Speech: Development from 4 to 6 Months
Document Type
Article
Program
Psychology (Pitzer)
Publication Date
1-2003
Keywords
Infants, Perception, Categorization, Infant-directed speech, Communication, Language, Development, Familiarization, Visual fixation
Abstract
To extend a previous finding that 6-month-old infants categorized low-pass filtered infant-directed (ID) utterances, we examined a) 6-month-old infants' categorization of more naturalistic, unfiltered ID utterances and b) the developmental progression of ID-speech categorization. In Experiment 1, 6-month-olds heard seven different unfiltered tokens from one class of ID utterance (approving or comforting), followed by a novel token from either the same or an unfamiliar category. Infants recovered, responding only to the unfamiliar category token, suggesting that they categorized naturalistic ID utterances. Four-month-olds' categorization of filtered and unfiltered versions of the ID utterances was assessed in Experiments 2 and 4. Four-month-olds did not recover, responding to a test token from an unfamiliar class, suggesting that they did not categorize either filtered or unfiltered ID utterances. Experiment 3 demonstrated that 4-month-old infants' failure to categorize did not result from their inability to complete the procedure. These results suggest that infants' processing of ID speech changes from 4 to 6 months of age.
Rights Information
© 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
DOI
10.1002/dev.10093
Recommended Citation
Spence, Melanie J., and David S. Moore. "Categorization of Infant-Directed Speech: Development from 4 to 6 Months." Developmental Psychobiology 42.1 (2003): 97-109.
