Speaker
Description
Voices are arguably the most relevant auditory stimuli for human social interactions conveying linguistic content but also offering several paralinguistic cues about the speakers, including their identity, gender, age, and emotional state. Thus, from voices, it is possible to extract both the linguistic content conveying propositional meaning and the prosodic aspects conveying the speaker's affective intention and emotional status. To date, there is substantial evidence indicating that newborns are equipped to identify both linguistic cues, recognize different languages (Byers-Henlein et al., 2010; Mehler et al., 1988), and also to be sensitive to prosodic and social aspects, being able to discriminate the emotional valence of sentences (Mastropieri & Turkewitz, 1999). However, it remains unknown to what extent linguistic or prosodic aspects of speech attract newborns’ attention the most.
In the present study, to unravel the impact of linguistic and social cues on influencing voice attention, newborns are presented with the same nursery rhyme narrated by an actress (i.e., condition with both linguistic and prosodic aspects), hummed by the same actress (i.e., condition with only prosodic cues) or narrated by a synthesizer (i.e., condition with only linguistic cues) while their high-amplitude nonnutritive sucking behavior was registered.
Our findings revealed a decelerated nonnutritive sucking behavior for the nursery rhyme narrated by the synthesizer, interpreted as a consequence of attentional capture in response to the condition in which the linguistic content is not coupled with the prosodic cues, as in the case of natural language to which newborns are exposed since the prenatal period.
| If you're submitting a symposium talk, what's the symposium title? | The ontogenetic necessity to extract information from the auditory environment |
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| If you're submitting a symposium, or a talk that is part of a symposium, is this a junior symposium? | Yes |
