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name</title></head><body>
<div>Dear colleageus,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Thank you to all those who responded to my query (on behalf of a
colleague) on whether the given name is the first self-contained
linguistic unit which infants recognize or somehow react to.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>The relevant references are:</div>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote>Mandel-Emer, Densie Roberta.(1997) Names as early lexical
candidates: Helpful in language processing? Dissertation Abstracts
International: Section B: the Sciences & Engineering. Vol 57(9-B),
Mar 1997, 5947, US: Univ. Microfilms International.</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>Mandel, Denise R; Jusczyk, Peter W; Pisoni, David B.
Infants' recognition of the sound patterns of their own
names. <i> Psychological Science</i>. Vol 6(5), Sep 1995,
314-317. Blackwell Publishers.</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>Abstract:</blockquote>
<blockquote>Examined whether 4.5 mo old infants preferred to listen to
their own names over foils that were either matched or mismatched for
stress pattern. 11 Ss were presented with repetitions of 4 different
names, his or her own name and 3 foils. Each name was repeated 15
times to create a stimulus file for testing. Using a modified version
of the head-turn preference procedure the Ss' preference to listen to
their own names over foils that were either stress-matched or
mismatched were measured. Results indicate that by 4.5 mo of age Ss
listen longer to their own names than to other Ss' name. Infants
demonstrated significant preferences for their own names compared with
foils with opposite patterns. These findings suggest that infants have
a detailed representation of the sound patterns of their
names.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>The basic finding is that infants respond to their own names as
early as 4.5 months (in isolation) and as early as 6 months in running
speech (with priming).</div>
<div>Since word recognition in general is argued to begin around 7-9
months, one could conclude that one's own name is probably one of the
first words learned.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>However, one respondent (Gedeon Deák,
<deak@Cogsci.ucsd.edu>) pointed out "that evidence that the
child's own name is differentiated from stress-pattern matched names
as early as 4 months does not mean that the infant recognizes it, or
knows that it refers to self. It merely indicates that the
sound-pattern, or a rough approximation of the sound pattern, has
started to take on some discriminant status in recognition
memory".</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>James Morgan (<James_Morgan@brown.edu>) refers to a recent
study in which he and his colleagues found that :</div>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote>When 5.5-month-olds hear one word consistently paired with
their name across several sentences (e.g., "There's Sally's bike.
Sally's bike has big wheels") and another word consistently
paired with another phonologically similar name (e.g., "That's
Hannah's cup. Hannah's cup has red flowers."), and are later
tested for their preferences for the words in isolation, infants (1)
listen longer to the word paired with their own name and (2) listen no
longer to the word paired with the foil name than to words with which
they had not been familiarized. That is, it may be inferred that
infants can recognize the word paired with their name in fluent
speech. Previous studies have indicated that infants fail to recognize
words in fluent speech until about 7.5 months. We are presently
conducting a follow-up study pitting words paired with "Mommy"
or "Mama" (whichever the infant is regularly exposed to)
versus "Lola" or "Lollie". Preliminary results
from this study suggest that 5.5-month-olds do not recognize the words
paired with either name. Taken together, these results suggest
that infants do indeed recognize the sounds of their given names very
early in development and that their names very quickly assume a
special status in fluent speech processing. </blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote>(the citation for this is: Heather Bortfeld, Karen
Rathbun, Roberta Golinkoff, James Morgan, and Jennifer Sootsman,
"Name recognition and speech segmentation").</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Finally, Marilyn Vihman (<m.vihman@bangor.ac.uk>) referred
to the related issue of the 'cocktail party phenomenon', in which a
person hears their own name preferentially in unattended speech. More
information on this can be found in:</div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>Alex HOUSEN<br>
<br>
Germanic Languages Dept. & Centre for Linguistics<br>
Vrije Universiteit Brussel<br>
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium<br>
Tel: +32-(0)2-629.38.84</div>
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