TY  - JOUR
A1  - Krasotkina, Anna
A1  - Götz, Antonia
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Schwarzer, Gudrun
T1  - Perceptual narrowing in speech and face recognition
T2  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - During the first year of life, infants undergo perceptual narrowing in the domains of speech and face perception. This is typically characterized by improvements in infants' abilities in discriminating among stimuli of familiar types, such as native speech tones and same-race faces. Simultaneously, infants begin to decline in their ability to discriminate among stimuli of types with which they have little experience, such as nonnative tones and other-race faces. The similarity in time-frames during which perceptual narrowing seems to occur in the domains of speech and face perception has led some researchers to hypothesize that the perceptual narrowing in these domains could be driven by shared domain-general processes. To explore this hypothesis, we tested 53 Caucasian 9-month-old infants from monolingual German households on their ability to discriminate among non-native Cantonese speech tones, as well among same-race German faces and other-race Chinese faces. We tested the infants using an infant-controlled habituation-dishabituation paradigm, with infants' preferences for looking at novel stimuli versus the habituated stimuli (dishabituation scores) acting as indicators of discrimination ability. As expected for their age, infants were able to discriminate between same-race faces, but not between other-race faces or non-native speech tones. Most interestingly, we found that infants' dishabituation scores for the non-native speech tones and other-race faces showed significant positive correlations, while the dishabituation scores for non-native speech tones and same-race faces did not. These results therefore support the hypothesis that shared domain-general mechanisms may drive perceptual narrowing in the domains of speech and face perception.
KW  - perceptual narrowing
KW  - perceptual reorganization
KW  - other-race effect
KW  - face perception
KW  - speech perception
KW  - habituation
Y1  - 2018
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/52010
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 9
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -