Psychology concepts and applications

Psychology

Mommy and Me: Familiar Names Help Launch Babies Into Speech-Structured Segmentation:

In their article, Mommy and Me: Familiar Names Help Launch Babies Into Speech-Structured Segmentation, Bortfeld, Morgan, Golinkoff, and Rathbun discuss infants' grammatical development with a specific emphasis on sentence construction. The article's four authors are representatives of three prominent United States' universities, Texas a&M University, Brown University, and the University of Delaware. Together, the four authors sought to answer the research question: "How do infants find the words in the tangle of speech that confronts them?" (298). By discussing the background of the study and the study's specifics, readers can make informed judgments as to the strengths and weaknesses of the study, theoretical perspective of the authors, and implications of the study's findings.

To begin their study, the authors enter the conversation by addressing why they attempted this research, or why its results may make an important contribution to a variety of fields. The authors ask readers to imagine a group of people talking to each other in a foreign language, specifically noting how difficult it is to determine when sentences, and even words begin and end when one does not know the language. For infants, this situation is perpetual. They constantly hear a blabber of speech, whether or not that speech is directed to them, but they do not make distinctions regarding words and sentences until much later. The authors imply that their motivation for undertaking this line of research was to determine whether or not familiar words helped infants in making the distinctions in syntax -- recognizing individual words in a sentence. Because previous work has been undertaken on the subject, the authors seek are motivated to continue the conversation with their own contribution. For instance, they discuss previous work regarding both adult and infant speech recognition and syntax formation. The authors reference studies that reinforce their idea that "segmenting fluent speech is a great challenge," and that discus the ways in which adults, who already know words segment speech (298). While adults use their previous knowledge of words to use context clues in order to determine sentence segments, infants must rely on other types of clues, such as how a word is said or how it is stressed. Furthermore, the authors discussed the scholarship that has already been done involving the language acquisition abilities of infants. This scholarship has suggested that infants actually acquire language abilities rather early. In fact, as early as seven and a half months of age, infants can communicate in the predominate stress pattern of English, and at eight months of age, infants can use speech patterns to distinguish words. This development only continues into nine months, when they can use these stress patterns to their advantage to communicate meaning. Finally, at just over ten months of age, infants can use less predominate stress patterns in the English language (298).

Although the amount of scholarship present on the subject of sentence segmentation is rather broad, Bortfeld et al. conclude that it can be significantly extended. Specifically, they claim that exactly how an infant learns to segment from "the top down" needs closer examination. The authors contend that the background information on this topic lends to the seriousness of word recognition in learning to segment, but they recognize that only a very few words are readily recognizable to most infants. Those words consist generally of "mommy," "daddy," and the infant's own name. In order to truly test the infant's segmenting ability, and therefore his or her ability to recognize that what parts of a sentence are indeed words, an experiment must include those few words with which the infant is most familiar. Thus, Bortfeld et al. decided to undertake this line of study based on the empirical research collected thus far and the ability to add to the conversation involving that research through more narrow tests, specifically using words that an infant knows to determine whether or not he or she has the ability to recognize that other parts of speech are words -- sentence segmentation.

The authors designed such a test. In fact, they designed three such experiments that would test the relationship between sentence segmentation and known words. The three tests dealt with using the infant's own name, other words familiar to the infant -- such as Mommy -- and no familiar words in order to determine what types of words influenced the infant's ability to practice successful sentence segmentation. In the three experiments, Bortfeld et al. drew upon previous scholarship that had tested infants between the ages of six and seven and a half months to determine whether or not they preferred sentences containing familiar words or sentences containing unfamiliar words. While the previous scholarship suggested that the younger infants showed no preference, the older infants did prefer the sentences containing familiar words (299). But Bortfeld at all tested the younger group of infants -- six-month-olds-contending that if they could "extract unfamiliar words from fluent speech when those words occur adjacent to the infants' own names," then they could "recognize words that follow their own name during familiarization and not words that follow another unfamiliar name" (299).

In the first experiment, Bortfeld et al. attempted to determine whether or not the infant would recognize unfamiliar words that came before or after the infant's own name. The researchers chose a total of twenty-four-six-month-olds who were being raised in an American English Language environment. The researchers familiarized each infant with two passages, one containing the infant's name and a target word and another containing a name that was similar to the infant's in stress patterns and syllables. The infants sat in a sound booth where a female voice repeated phrases associating their names and another infant's name with a target word to at a conversational voice level. After the familiarization, or trial, the infants were tested for recognition. Infants who turned to the side of the sound booth on which the voices were playing for a certain amount of time were have judged to recognize the word. The results of this test suggested that the infants preferred the word that had been repeated with their names, as infants looked for a longer period of time at the side of the booth on which the target word had been repeated than to the side on which the alternate name target and control words had been repeated. Thus, the experimenters concluded that six-month-old infants could segment sentences, recognizing a new word when it is associated with their own name.

In the second experiment, the researchers performed a similar method, this time replacing their own names with the word, "mommy" or "mama," whichever was used in the infant's family. Like in the previous experiment, this experiment concluded with results that echoed the hypothesis. Infants "again displayed a preference for the word that had been paired with the familiar name" (301). This time, the children listened longer to the word that was associated with the familiar word, leading the researchers to believe that "infants segmented, stored, and recognized the word that had been paired with Mommy (or Mama)," and that "infants can use such names as anchors for segmenting subsequent novel words from the speech stream" (301). Finally, the third experiment followed the same methodology, with the exception that the words "Mommy" or "Mama" were replaced by "Tommy" and "Lola," and paired with the familiar word target from the previous test. This time, the children displayed no difference in looking times, suggesting that they did not recognize the word paired with an unfamiliar topic, even if it is acoustically similar to "Mommy" or "Mama." Based on these three experiments, the authors' overall findings suggest that six-month-old infants can use their knowledge of familiar words to learn speech segmentation.

These results have a variety of implications across a host of fields. The fact that infants begin quite early to recognize their own names as well as the name given to their caretakers suggests that infants are beginning to form a sense of identity at the age of only six months, in addition to recognizing their caregivers and associating certain names with the meeting of their needs. The implications of this study, therefore, open up further avenues for exploration in the field of psychology. Researchers might test infants to attempt to determine if they associate positive feelings with some words and negative feelings with other, or if they are able to distinguish themselves from a group, identify themselves as part of a family unit, or act in other meaningful ways. Furthermore, the results of this study have a variety of implications for childhood cognitions, such as how children learn at an early age to analyze and synthesize through attempting to distinguish speech patterns. In addition to psychology, the results of Bortfeld et al.'s study is extremely significant to the field of English and linguistics. By understanding how infants learn to recognize words, linguists will be better able to determine how language is developed in the unformed mind, in addition to how people with no speech, or foreign language learners, acquire speech from listening to fluent speakers. Finally, the study has a variety of implications for both the fields of education and early childhood development. Because Bortfeld et al. have distinguished that infants can recognize familiar words and words that precede or follow them at a very early age, educators in grades as low as pre-school can use this information to design a curriculum for maximum learning. Thus, the implications of Bortfeld et al.'s study have depth and are widespread across disciplines.