TY  - JOUR
A1  - Krasotkina, Anna
A1  - Götz, Antonia
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Schwarzer, Gudrun
T1  - Perceptual narrowing in face- and speech-perception domains in infancy
BT  - a longitudinal approach
JF  - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal
N2  - 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.
KW  - face perception
KW  - speech perception
KW  - longitudinal
KW  - infant
KW  - perceptual
KW  - narrowing
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101607
SN  - 0163-6383
SN  - 1879-0453
VL  - 64
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - New York
ER  -