title: Suprasegmental information affects processing of talking faces at birth.
abstract: From birth, newborns show a preference for faces talking a native language compared to silent faces. The present study addresses two questions that remained unanswered by previous research: (a) Does the familiarity with the language play a role in this process and (b) Are all the linguistic and paralinguistic cues necessary in this case? Experiment 1 extended newborns' preference for native speakers to non-native ones. Given that fetuses and newborns are sensitive to the prosodic characteristics of speech, Experiments 2 and 3 presented faces talking native and nonnative languages with the speech stream being low-pass filtered. Results showed that newborns preferred looking at a person who talked to them even when only the prosodic cues were provided for both languages. Nonetheless, a familiarity preference for the previously talking face is observed in the "normal speech" condition (i.e., Experiment 1) and a novelty preference in the "filtered speech" condition (Experiments 2 and 3). This asymmetry reveals that newborns process these two types of stimuli differently and that they may already be sensitive to a mismatch between the articulatory movements of the face and the corresponding speech sounds.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire Ethologie Cognition Développement (LECD), Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (UPOND), Nanterre, France. Electronic address: bahia.guellai@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Bahia
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Guellai
authors.affiliation: Université Paris Descartes, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception (LPP), UMR CNRS 8158, Centre Biomédical des Saints-Pères, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Karima
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mersad
authors.affiliation: Centre d'Etudes Atomiques-Neurospin-INSERM, Gif/Yvette, France.
authors.forename: Arlette
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Streri
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003463:Cues; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn / Q000523:psychology*; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014741:Video Recording
keywords: Face recognition; Languages; Newborns; Prosody; Speech processing