Professor Reveals Findings on Child Development

Dr. Rochelle Newman gave a lecture this past Thursday in Funger Hall on how early perceptual abilities from infants can later affect how they process language.  Newman, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, received her bachelor's in speech pathology and now studies language processing in adults.

Dr. Newman discussed how one thing infants often recognize when they are four and a half years old is their name. This serves as a sign that their auditory system is in development.


"What happens is you use a sound that an infant knows and see if they can recognize it," Newman said.  "They may not know what it means to them, but they know it's a sound pattern they hear fairly often."

When sounds are funneled down the ear canal, they strike the same area. According to Newman, this differentiates from sight because when something hits our eyes, it reaches different sensor receptors.


However, because an infant's auditory system is not as well-developed as an adult's, an infant cannot separate different sources of sound.  This is especially noticeable when infants are in noisy environments.


"We might expect that infants would have difficulty in noisy environments," Newman said.  "We know that second language learners who have less knowledge about the language have problems in noisy environments. Infants will suffer the same problem."


Newman demonstrated this with the headturn preference procedure. A child would sit in a parent's lap, a light would flash and a voice would say the infant's name, often over noise. In cases where the infant would recognize the sound as familiar, they would pay more attention to it.


"When testing with older infants around nine months to 13 months, the amount of time they spent looking at the source saying their name increased," Newman said.


The results of this experiment, Newman explained, showed that infants younger than nine months may not be able to acquire useful speech information in real world settings. By developing perceptual skills over time, they can better develop their language skills.


One of these particular skills is segmentation, which is an infant's ability to separate streams of speech into individual words.


"This is important because parents don't just talk to babies," Newman said.  "There aren't pauses in the words when speaking the same way there are breaks when typing a sentence."


The other skill is statistical learning: an infant's ability to recognize consistent patterns in what they hear.


Newman's ongoing work includes a large, longitudinal study with infants that critically examines what skills that develop during infancy are particularly important and how they correlate with sound.