The cocktail party effect in infants revisited: listening to one's name in noise.
This study examined infants' abilities to separate speech from different talkers and to recognize a familiar word (the infant's own name) in the context of noise. In 4 experiments, infants heard repetitions of either their names or unfamiliar names in the presence of background babble. Five-month-old infants listened longer to their names when the target voice was 10 dB, but not 5 dB, more intense than the background. Nine-month-olds likewise failed to identify their names at a 5-dB signal-to-noise ratio, but 13-month-olds succeeded. Thus, by 5 months, infants possess some capacity to selectively attend to an interesting voice in the context of competing distractor voices. However, this ability is quite limited and develops further when infants near 1 year of age.
Newman
Rochelle S
RS
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Program in Neurosciences and Cognitive Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, MD 20742, USA. rnewman@hesp.umd.edu
D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D007899:Leisure Activities; D008297:Male; D009275:Names; D009622:Noise; D013067:Speech Perception