title: Infant perceptual development for faces and spoken words: an integrated approach.
abstract: There are obvious differences between recognizing faces and recognizing spoken words or phonemes that might suggest development of each capability requires different skills. Recognizing faces and perceiving spoken language, however, are in key senses extremely similar endeavors. Both perceptual processes are based on richly variable, yet highly structured input from which the perceiver needs to extract categorically meaningful information. This similarity could be reflected in the perceptual narrowing that occurs within the first year of life in both domains. We take the position that the perceptual and neurocognitive processes by which face and speech recognition develop are based on a set of common principles. One common principle is the importance of systematic variability in the input as a source of information rather than noise. Experience of this variability leads to perceptual tuning to the critical properties that define individual faces or spoken words versus their membership in larger groupings of people and their language communities. We argue that parallels can be drawn directly between the principles responsible for the development of face and spoken language perception.
authors.affiliation: School of Social Science and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
authors.forename: Tamara L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Watson
authors.forename: Rachel A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Robbins
authors.forename: Catherine T
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Best
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D012938:Social Perception; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: face recognition; face space; infant perceptual development; perceptual assimilation; perceptual narrowing; speech perception; spoken word recognition