Summary: Infants reacting to their given name

[Alex Housen]

Dear colleageus,

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.


The relevant references are:

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.

Mandel, Denise R; Jusczyk, Peter W; Pisoni, David B. Infants'
recognition of the sound patterns of their own names.  Psychological
Science. Vol 6(5),  Sep 1995, 314-317. Blackwell Publishers.

Abstract:
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.


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).
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.

However, one respondent (Gedeon Deák, <deak at 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".

James Morgan (<James_Morgan at brown.edu>) refers to a recent study in
which he and his colleagues found that :

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.

(the citation for this is: Heather Bortfeld, Karen Rathbun, Roberta
Golinkoff, James Morgan, and Jennifer Sootsman, "Name recognition and
speech segmentation").


Finally, Marilyn Vihman (<m.vihman at 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:

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.


--
Alex HOUSEN

Germanic Languages Dept. &  Centre for Linguistics
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium
Tel: +32-(0)2-629.38.84
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/info-childes/attachments/20020314/fd41f672/attachment.htm>