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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
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Foundational tuning: how infants' attention to speech predicts language development
Athena Vouloumanos1, Suzanne Curtin
1Department of Psychology, New York University.
Cognitive Science
|August 8, 2014
Summary
Infants
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Infants exhibit an innate preference for speech sounds.
- The link between early speech attention and later language skills remains unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if infants' attention to speech at 12 months predicts their expressive vocabulary development at 18 months.
- To determine if this relationship is specific to speech or a general attentiveness effect.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a preferential listening procedure with 12-month-old infants.
- Infants were exposed to speech and non-speech auditory stimuli.
- Expressive vocabulary was assessed at 18 months.
Main Results:
- Infants' attention to speech at 12 months significantly predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months.
- General development indices and attention to non-speech did not show predictive relationships.
- The findings suggest a specific link between speech attention and language acquisition, not general attentiveness.
Conclusions:
- Early attention to speech is a direct predictor of expressive vocabulary development in infants.
- This suggests that innate biases for speech perception may form a foundation for language acquisition.
- Evolutionary perceptual capacities could underpin formal language proficiency, analogous to number sense and mathematics.
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