Infants reacting to their given name

[Marilyn Vihman]

>Dear colleagues,
>
>This is a request on behalf of a friend and colleague, who is a neuro-surgeon.
>
>He and his team are measuring the brain activity of comatose,
>minimally conscious and locked-in patients by exposing them to their
>given names (as opposed to other first names).  The aim is to
>develop a diagnostic for level of consciousness and a prognosis
>procedure for recovery.
>My colleague's assumption is that a person's given name is the most
>'ingrained' of all linguistic stimuli.  He has references indicating
>that the given name is retained the longest in the case of dementia,
>and that it is the first stimulus to which patients react after
>total anesthesia.
>He is now looking for references that show (or suggest) that the
>given name is the first specific 'word' or self-contained linguistic
>unit which infants recognize or somehow react to.  He suspects that
>this capacity develops before the age of 7 months.
>
>Please send any references or comments to me.  I will pass them on
>and summarize for the list.
>
>Thanks for your help.
>
>--
>Alex HOUSEN
>Germanic Languages Dept. &  Centre for Linguistics
>Vrije Universiteit Brussel
>Alex.Housen at vub.ac.be

The reference you need is
>Mandel, D. R., Jusczyk, P. W. & Pisoni, D. B. (1995). Infants'
>recognition of the sound pattern of their own names. Psychological
>Science, 6, 315-318.

I don't know of any other studies of this issue, but there are some
good papers about the 'cocktail party phenomenon', in which a person
hears their own name preferentially in unattended speech. The most
recent one I know of, with refs to older lit., is Wood, N. & Cowan,
N. (1995). The cocktail party phenomenon revisited: How frequent are
attention shifts to one's name in an irrelevant auditory channel?
J.of Exp. Psych.: Learn., Mem & Cog, 21, 255-260.

-marilyn vihman


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