Babies Don't Forget What They Hear
Infants can remember the sounds of words almost a year before realizing their meanings, according to a report in today's issue of Science. The experiments suggest that infants learnBy the end of their first year of life, an infant has already developed crucial skills for learning language. A 1-year-old can already compensate for differences in voices and speaking rates, for example, and recognize his or her native language. However, little is known about infants' long-term memory for the sound patterns of words. Peter Jusczyk, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, and Elizabeth Hohne, a psychologist at AT&T Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, set out to learn if young infants possess this type of memory, a crucial prerequisite for eventually building vocabulary.
Jusczyk and Hohne made 10 visits to 8-month-old infants over the course of 2 weeks and played them a half-hour audio tape of children's stories. Two weeks after the last of the 10 visits, the infants were brought to the lab. The researchers read them lists of words, some of which came from the stories (for instance, elephant, best, and jungle). Mixed in were foils that sounded similar (apricot, beach, and camel), but had not been mentioned in the stories. Story words kept the infants' attention on average about 15% longer than the foils, an indication that the infants remembered the story words. A control group of infants that had never heard the stories paid equal attention to words of either list.
The work is "a landmark, pioneering study," says David Pisoni, a psychologist at Indiana University in Bloomington. Many scientists had thought that infants start with a concept, he says, then find the word that describes it. This study shows that infants have a previously unknown type of unconscious memory for detailed sound patterns. Even if infants don't understand what they hear, Pisoni points out that "their nervous system is paying attention."
Definitions
from the AP Dictionary of Science and Technology
Related Pages on APnet
- Brain and Cognition
- Brain and Language
- Cognitive Psychology
- Journal of Memory and Language
- Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
- Developmental Review
- Bjork: Memory
- Dempster: Interference and Inhibition in Cognition
- Gelman: Perceptual and Cognitive Development
Related links from the article above:
- Peter W. Jusczyk
- AT&T Labs Research
- David B. Pisoni
- Speech Research Laboratory at Indiana University
- Words (and Sounds) to Learn By (CNN story)
- Sound Patterns: Learning Language Keys (APA story)
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