Listen to your mother! The role of talker familiarity in infant streaming.
Little is known about the acoustic cues infants might use to selectively attend to one talker in the presence of background noise. This study examined the role of talker familiarity as a possible cue. Infants either heard their own mothers (maternal-voice condition) or a different infant's mother (novel-voice condition) repeating isolated words while a female distracter voice spoke fluently in the background. Subsequently, infants heard passages produced by the target voice containing either the familiarized, target words or novel words. Infants in the maternal-voice condition listened significantly longer to the passages containing familiar words; infants in the novel-voice condition showed no preference. These results suggest that infants are able to separate the simultaneous speech of two women when one of the voices is highly familiar to them. However, infants seem to find separating the simultaneous speech of two unfamiliar women extremely difficult.
Barker
Brittan A
BA
Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, University of Iowa, 21200 Pomerantz Family Pavilion, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. brittan-barker@uiowa.edu
Newman
Rochelle S
RS
D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013067:Speech Perception; D014831:Voice