Babies Know Early on Where

Babies Know Early on Where Words Begin and End

Published in Scientific American Online

The author is restating and emphasizing the findings posted the June issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology. In an article about Human Perception and Performance the author notes that babies as young as eight and a half months can sense the sound and boundaries of words. The initial research used the head turn method, attracting a baby's attention and noting when that attention is refocused again on the same stimulus, in this case the word "Dice." The author of this article concludes that infants can distinguish word boundaries long before they have actually acquired the use of language. This may Indicate an inherent ability to finely distinguish one sound from another, or more precisely, a familiar sound from an unfamiliar one.

Body

Using the research provided by John Hopkins University in the aforementioned journal article, the author restates the experiment of a child seated on the lap of a caretaker in an isolation booth. There is a green light in front of the child and two red lights on each side. First the green light is lit, which attract the child attention immediately, then a red light is turned on and a word or sequence of words is played as an observer notes how ling it takes for the infant to turn his or her head toward the light and music.

Afterwards, the infant would be familiarized with the target word by having it repeated in sing-song fashion many time so the infant would become familiar with it an "like" the sound. The experiment continues then as the word is played over the red light speaker. Observers would note how long the infant would take to recognize the word by turning towards the sound and red light when the word was played. They would also try to trick the infant with several combinations of the word in sentences as well as other disparities. The researchers noted that the infant was so fine tuned to the word that even misparsed or sound alikes did not attract his or her attention, only the target word.

This article is an ideal one to review for a Psychology 101 class since it is observing one of the earliest cognitive preferences exhibited by a human being. The psychological preference not only for familiar caretakers, or food, but also for familiar sounds as well as perhaps even the ability to recognize word boundaries.

The article relates directly to this class in that it is an excellent example of the use of perception and memory. Not only does the infant perceive and has to ability to finely distinguish between the sounds of words, but shows the ability to retain and remember that sound over a period of time.

While I agree with the authors intention and find a great deal of the interest in the research represented, I find that by only using this one research example the author fails to meet the burden of proof for his conclusion that infants know when words end and begin. The target word should have been presented inside a long nonsense word strung together to see if the infant could distinguish it, but there was no evidence presented here.

The brevity of the article was both a positive (like) in the sense it was well organized and quickly understood, but also a negative (dislike) as mentioned previously that it needed more research to reach an acceptable agreement with the author's conclusion.