To understand spoken words, listeners must appropriately interpret co-occurring talker characteristics and speech sound content. This ability was tested in 6- to 14-months-olds by measuring their looking to named food and body part images. In the "new talker" condition (n = 90), pictures were named by an unfamiliar voice; in the…

Infants in more alert states demonstrated significantly higher rates of sucking following sound change. Treating state as a dependent variable revealed that state was not significantly affected by a change in stimulus conditions. (RH)

Investigated the possibility that evidence of frequency discrimination might be found when the experimental procedures involved the conjugate reinforcement of nonnutritive sucking. (SDH)

Examines the relation between aspects of the fundamental frequency (basic pitch) of 16 infant newborn cries and 28 multiparous mothers' perceptions of those cries. Results support the hypothesis that increases in fundamental frequency are related to increases in maternal perceptions of the intensity of the infant's cry. (Author/RWB)

Groups of 7 1/2-month-old infants heard 1 of 8 episodes consisting of no, slight, moderate, or large discrepancy between a habituated standard and a transformed auditory stimulus. Patterns of cardiac deceleration supported the hypothesis that attentiveness is an inverted-U function of the degree of discrepancy between stimulus event and schema.…

Investigates preperceptual auditory storage among eight 9-week-old infants in three experiments using a modification of an adult masking paradigm and a nonnutritive sucking discrimination procedure. Results suggest that echoic storage contributes to auditory perception in infancy and, for infants compared to adults, echoic traces have a longer…

Assessed the ability of 5-month-old infants to discriminate between auditory tone patterns differing in temporal arrangement but utilizing the same component tones. Heart rate change provided the measure of pattern discrimination. (JMB)

Addresses questions about infant perceptual ability and the possibility of its decline as a function of development in the absence of specific experience. Compares English-speaking adults, Hindi-speaking adults, and 7-month-old infants on their ability to discriminate two pairs of natural Hindi (non-English) speech contrasts. (Author/RH)

Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Results suggested that at 4 months, infants attended primarily to the featural information, at 6 months primarily to the asynchrony, and at 8 months to both features independently. (Author/KB)