@article{KrasotkinaGoetzHoehleetal.2021, author = {Krasotkina, Anna and G{\"o}tz, Antonia and H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Schwarzer, Gudrun}, title = {Perceptual narrowing in face- and speech-perception domains in infancy}, series = {Infant behavior \& development : an international and interdisciplinary journal}, volume = {64}, journal = {Infant behavior \& development : an international and interdisciplinary journal}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {New York}, issn = {0163-6383}, doi = {10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101607}, pages = {9}, year = {2021}, abstract = {During the first year of life, infants undergo a process known as perceptual narrowing, which reduces their sensitivity to classes of stimuli which the infants do not encounter in their environment. It has been proposed that perceptual narrowing for faces and speech may be driven by shared domain-general processes. To investigate this theory, our study longitudinally tested 50 German Caucasian infants with respect to these domains first at 6 months of age followed by a second testing at 9 months of age. We used an infant-controlled habituation-dishabituation paradigm to test the infants' ability to discriminate among other-race Asian faces and non-native Cantonese speech tones, as well as same-race Caucasian faces as a control. We found that while at 6 months of age infants could discriminate among all stimuli, by 9 months of age they could no longer discriminate among other-race faces or non-native tones. However, infants could discriminate among same-race stimuli both at 6 and at 9 months of age. These results demonstrate that the same infants undergo perceptual narrowing for both other-race faces and non-native speech tones between the ages of 6 and 9 months. This parallel development of perceptual narrowing occurring in both the face and speech perception modalities over the same period of time lends support to the domain-general theory of perceptual narrowing in face and speech perception.}, language = {en} } @article{LangusHoehle2021, author = {Langus, Alan and H{\"o}hle, Barbara}, title = {Object individuation and labelling in 6-month-old infants}, series = {Infant behavior \& development}, volume = {65}, journal = {Infant behavior \& development}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {New York}, issn = {0163-6383}, doi = {10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101627}, pages = {12}, year = {2021}, abstract = {The ability to determine how many objects are involved in physical events is fundamental for reasoning about the world that surrounds us. Previous studies suggest that infants can fail to individuate objects in ambiguous occlusion events until their first birthday and that learning words for the objects may play a crucial role in the development of this ability. The present eye-tracking study tested whether the classical object individuation experiments underestimate young infants' ability to individuate objects and the role word learning plays in this process. Three groups of 6-month-old infants (N = 72) saw two opaque boxes side by side on the eye-tracker screen so that the content of the boxes was not visible. During a familiarization phase, two visually identical objects emerged sequentially from one box and two visually different objects from the other box. For one group of infants the familiarization was silent (Visual Only condition). For a second group of infants the objects were accompanied with nonsense words so that objects' shape and linguistic labels indicated the same number of objects in the two boxes (Visual \& Language condition). For the third group of infants, objects' shape and linguistic labels were in conflict (Visual vs. Language condition). Following the familiarization, it was revealed that both boxes contained the same number of objects (e.g. one or two). In the Visual Only condition, infants looked longer to the box with incorrect number of objects at test, showing that they could individuate objects using visual cues alone. In the Visual \& Language condition infants showed the same looking pattern. However, in the Visual vs Language condition infants looked longer to the box with incorrect number of objects according to linguistic labels. The results show that infants can individuate objects in a complex object individuation paradigm considerably earlier than previously thought and that linguistic cues enforce their own preference in object individuation. The results are consistent with the idea that when language and visual information are in conflict, language can exert an influence on how young infants reason about the visual world.}, language = {en} } @article{KrasotkinaGoetzHoehleetal.2021, author = {Krasotkina, Anna and G{\"o}tz, Antonia and H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Schwarzer, Gudrun}, title = {Bimodal familiarization re-sensitizes 12-month-old infants to other-race faces}, series = {Infant behavior \& development : an international and interdisciplinary journal}, volume = {62}, journal = {Infant behavior \& development : an international and interdisciplinary journal}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {Amsterdam}, issn = {0163-6383}, doi = {10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101502}, pages = {8}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Perceptual narrowing in the domain of face perception typically begins to reduce infants' sensitivity to differences distinguishing other-race faces from approximately 6 months of age. The present study investigated whether it is possible to re-sensitize Caucasian 12-month-old infants to other-race Asian faces through statistical learning by familiarizing them with different statistical distributions of these faces. The familiarization faces were created by generating a morphed continuum from one Asian face identity to another. In the unimodal condition, infants were familiarized with a frequency distribution wherein they saw the midpoint face of the morphed continuum the most frequently. In the bimodal condition, infants were familiarized with a frequency distribution wherein they saw faces closer to the endpoints of the morphed continuum the most frequently. After familiarization, infants were tested on their discrimination of the two original Asian faces. The infants' looking times during the test indicated that infants in the bimodal condition could discriminate between the two faces, while infants in the unimodal condition could not. These findings therefore suggest that 12-month-old Caucasian infants could be re-sensitized to Asian faces by familiarizing them with a bimodal frequency distribution of such faces.}, language = {en} } @article{MarimonTarterHofmannVerissimoetal.2021, author = {Marimon Tarter, Mireia and Hofmann, Andrea and Ver{\´i}ssimo, Joao Marques and M{\"a}nnel, Claudia and Friederici, Angela Dorkas and H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Wartenburger, Isabell}, title = {Children's Learning of Non-adjacent Dependencies Using a Web-Based Computer Game Setting}, series = {Frontiers in Psychology}, volume = {12}, journal = {Frontiers in Psychology}, publisher = {Frontiers}, address = {Lausanne, Schweiz}, issn = {1664-1078}, doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2021.734877}, pages = {1 -- 15}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Infants show impressive speech decoding abilities and detect acoustic regularities that highlight the syntactic relations of a language, often coded via non-adjacent dependencies (NADs, e.g., is singing). It has been claimed that infants learn NADs implicitly and associatively through passive listening and that there is a shift from effortless associative learning to a more controlled learning of NADs after the age of 2 years, potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To investigate if older children are able to learn NADs, Lammertink et al. (2019) recently developed a word-monitoring serial reaction time (SRT) task and could show that 6-11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times (RTs) increased then they were presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in a younger group of 52 children between the age of 4-8 years in a remote, web-based, game-like setting (whack-a-mole). Children were exposed to Italian phrases containing NADs and had to monitor the occurrence of a target syllable, which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children did a "Stem Completion" task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to choose the second element of the NAD to complete the stimuli. Our findings show that, despite large variability in the data, children aged 4-8 years are sensitive to NADs; they show the expected differences in r RTs in the SRT task and could transfer the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD dependency learning in childhood and the practical impact and limitations of collecting these data in a web-based setting.}, language = {en} } @article{HoehleFritzscheBollAvetisyanetal.2021, author = {H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Fritzsche, Tom and Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie and Hullebus, Marc and Gafos, Adamantios I.}, title = {Respect the surroundings}, series = {JASA Express Letters}, volume = {1}, journal = {JASA Express Letters}, number = {2}, publisher = {AIP Publ.}, address = {Melville}, issn = {2691-1191}, doi = {10.1121/10.0003574}, pages = {7}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Fourteen-month-olds' ability to distinguish a just learned word, /bu?k/, from its minimally different word, /du?k/, was assessed under two pre-exposure conditions: one where /b, d/-initial forms occurred in a varying vowel context and another where the vowel was fixed but the final consonant varied. Infants in the experiments benefited from the variable vowel but not from the variable final consonant context, suggesting that vowel variability but not all kinds of variability are beneficial. These results are discussed in the context of time-honored observations on the vowel-dependent nature of place of articulation cues for consonants.}, language = {en} }