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Browsing by Author "Bhullar, Naureen"

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    Effects of Facial and Vocal Emotion on Word Recognition in 11-to-13-month-old infants
    Bhullar, Naureen (Virginia Tech, 2007-05-01)
    The speech commonly addressed to infants (infant-directed speech or IDS) is believed to have multiple functions, including communication of emotion and highlighting linguistic aspects of speech. However, these two functions are most often studied separately so that the influence of emotional prosody (the changes in intonation and vocal quality that relate to emotion) on linguistic processing in infants has rarely been addressed. Given that language learning during infancy occurs in the context of natural infant-caretaker exchanges that most certainly include emotion communication and co-regulation, it is important to integrate the concepts of emotional communication and linguistic communication in studying language learning. This study examined the influence of both positive (happy) and negative (sad) face+voice contexts on word recognition in 11-to-13-month-old infants. It was hypothesized that infants would learn and subsequently recognize words when they were delivered in a happy context, but will experience more difficulty in learning and/or recognition of the same words when delivered in a sad context. The general pattern of results confirmed these predictions in that after habituating to sentences containing a specific target nonsense word, infants in the Happy Condition recovered their attention to the same sentences with a novel target word. In contrast, infants in the Sad Condition showed no significant recovery to a change in target words. These results contribute to our understanding of how emotional tone can facilitate and/or attenuate attention in older infants as they engage in language learning with their caretakers.
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    Gender of Speaker Influences Infants' Discrimination of Non-Native Phonemes in a Multimodal Context
    Bhullar, Naureen (Virginia Tech, 2004-12-15)
    Previous research has shown that infants can discriminate both native and non-native speech contrasts before the age of 10-12 months. After this age, infants' phoneme discrimination starts resembling adults', as they are able to discriminate native contrasts, but lose their sensitivity to non-native ones. However, the majority of these studies have been carried out in a testing context, which is dissimilar to the natural language-learning context experienced by infants. This study was designed to see the influence of speaker-gender and visual speech information on the ability of 11 month-old infants to discriminate the non-native contrasts. Previous research in our laboratory revealed that 11 month-old infants were able to discriminate retroflex and dental Hindi contrasts when the speech was infant-directed, the speaker was a female and visual speech information was available (i.e., infant watched digital movies of female speakers). A follow-up study showed that with an adult-directed male voice and absence of visual speech information, 11 month-old infants did not discriminate the same non-native contrasts. Hence the aim of the present study was to address the questions posed by these two studies. Does the gender of the speaker matter alone? Also, to what extent is the visual speech information helpful for the discriminatory abilities of the infants? Would the manner of speech help infants discriminate the non-native contrasts? The result of the current study show that 11 month-old infants were unable to discriminate between the phonemic Hindi contrasts. Hence gender seems to matter as the presence of male face and voice did not seem to aid discrimination.
  • Plasticity in older infants’ perception of non-native speech sounds: The role of selective attention in context
    Panneton, Robin K.; Ostroff, Wendy; Bhullar, Naureen (2024)
    Developmental plasticity is the ability of extant conditions and circumstances to increase variability in phenotypic expression throughout the lifespan. During human infancy, plasticity expands and contracts depending on domains of functioning, developmental history, and timing. In terms of language processing, young infants attend to and discriminate contrastive sounds within both native and non-native phonetic systems, but become selectively attuned to native sounds by the end of the first year. However, studies relevant to this decreasing sensitivity in phoneme perception have not always included factors that are emerging as powerful promoters of attention such as infant-directed speech (IDS), synchronous multimodal face+voice presentations, and female speakers. We investigated whether English-learning 11-month-olds would discriminate a non-native Hindi phoneme contrast with these factors in place. Results showed significant discrimination of the Hindi contrast, regardless of speech register, provided the sounds were presented by a dynamic female speaker. Interestingly, when a dynamic male IDS speaker was used, no significant discrimination was found. These results demonstrate plasticity in non-native speech perception contingent upon inducing and supporting selective attention. Multimodal information emanating from female speakers promoted perception of challenging non-native sounds, demonstrating the power of context for language learning in early development.