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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 23, 2026

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

Published on: May 15, 2019

The invariance problem in infancy: a pupillometry study.

Jean-Rémy Hochmann¹, Liuba Papeo²

¹Department of Psychology, Harvard University Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, École Normale Supérieure jr.hochmann@gmail.com.

Psychological Science

|October 2, 2014

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Six-month-old infants can solve the speech invariance problem, identifying consonants across different vowels. This developmental milestone precedes their ability to produce syllables, highlighting early auditory perception capabilities.

Keywords:

infants pupillometry speech perception

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Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Auditory Perception
Speech Development

Background:

Adults solve the speech invariance problem, recognizing consonants despite acoustic variations with different vowels.
Infants' ability to solve this problem remains largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether 3- and 6-month-old infants can solve the speech invariance problem.
To establish a novel pupillometry-based methodology for infant speech perception research.

Main Methods:

Developed a novel pupillometry technique to measure infant responses to auditory stimuli.
Experiment 1: Assessed infant sensitivity to frequent versus infrequent acoustic stimuli.
Experiment 2: Tested 3- and 6-month-olds' ability to identify invariant consonants across varying vowels.

Main Results:

Infants demonstrated increased pupil dilation to infrequent acoustic stimuli, validating the methodology.
Six-month-olds, but not 3-month-olds, successfully solved the speech invariance problem.
The ability to solve the invariance problem emerged before the capacity for syllable production.

Conclusions:

Six-month-old infants possess the ability to perceive invariant consonants within varying phonetic contexts.
This auditory skill develops independently of motor-based syllable production abilities.
Pupillometry offers a viable method for studying infant speech perception.