Infants' First Words are not Phonetically Specified: Own Name Recognition in British English‐Learning 5‐Month‐Olds

By the end of their first year of life, infants’ representations of familiar words contain phonetic detail; yet little is known about the nature of these representations at the very beginning of word learning. Bouchon et al. ( 2015 ) showed that French‐learning 5‐month‐olds could detect a vowel change in their own name and not a consonant change, but also that infants reacted to the acoustic distance between vowels. Here, we tested British English‐learning 5‐month‐olds in a similar study to examine whether the acoustic/phonological characteristics of the native language shape the nature of the acoustic/phonetic cues that infants pay attention to. In the first experiment, British English‐learning infants failed to recognize their own name compared to a mispronunciation of initial consonant (e.g., Molly versus Nolly) or vowel (e.g., April versus Ipril). Yet in the second experiment, they did so when the contrasted name was phonetically dissimilar (e.g., Sophie versus Amber). Differences in phoneme category (stops versus continuants) between the correct consonant versus the incorrect one significantly predicted infants’ own name recognition in the first experiment. Altogether, these data suggest that infants might enter into a phonetic mode of processing through different paths depending on the acoustic characteristics of their native language.     

Infants' Rapid Learning About Self‐Propelled Objects

Six experiments investigated 7‐month‐old infants' capacity to learn about the self‐propelled motion of an object. After observing 1 wind‐up toy animal move on its own and a second wind‐up toy animal move passively by an experimenter's hand, infants looked reliably longer at the former object during a subsequent stationary test, providing evidence that infants learned and remembered the mapping of objects and their motions. In further experiments, infants learned the mapping for different animals and retained it over a 15‐min delay, providing evidence that the learning is robust and infants' expectations about self‐propelled motion are enduring. Further experiments suggested that infants' learning was less reliable when the self‐propelled objects were novel or lacked faces, body parts, and articulated, biological motion. The findings are discussed in relation to infants' developing knowledge of object categories and capacity to learn about objects in the first year of life.     

Recognition and Representation of Function Words in English‐Learning Infants

We examined infants' recognition of functors and the accuracy of the representations that infants construct of the perceived word forms. Auditory stimuli were “Functor + Content Word” versus “Nonsense Functor + Content Word” sequences. Eight‐, 11‐, and 13‐month‐old infants heard both real functors and matched nonsense functors (prosodically analogous to their real counterparts but containing a segmental change). Results reveal that 13‐month‐olds recognized functors with attention to segmental detail. Eight‐month‐olds did not distinguish real versus nonsense functors. The performance of 11‐month‐olds fell in between that of the older and younger groups, consistent with an emerging recognition of real functors. The three age groups exhibited a clear developmental trend. We propose that in the earliest stages of vocabulary acquisition, function elements receive no segmentally detailed representations, but such representations are gradually constructed so that once vocabulary growth starts in earnest, fully specified functor representations are in place to support it.     

Infants' Evolving Representations of Object Motion During Occlusion: A Longitudinal Study of 6‐ to 12‐Month‐Old Infants

Infants' ability to track temporarily occluded objects that moved on circular trajectories was investigated in 20 infants using a longitudinal design. They were first seen at 6 months and then every 2nd month until the end of their 1st year. Infants were presented with occlusion events covering 20% of the target's trajectory (effective occlusion interval ranged from 500–4,000 msec). Gaze was measured using an ASL 504 infrared eye‐tracking system. Results effectively demonstrate that infants from 6 months of age can represent the spatiotemporal dynamics of occluded objects. Infants at all ages tested were able to predict, under certain conditions, when and where the object would reappear after occlusion. They moved gaze accurately to the position where the object was going to reappear and scaled their timing to the current occlusion duration. The average rate of predictive gaze crossings increased with occlusion duration. These results are discussed as a 2‐factor process. Successful predictions are dependent on strong representations, themselves dependent on the richness of information available during encoding and graded representations.     

Word Level Stress and Lexical Processing in 17‐Month‐Old Infants

Detailed representations enable infants to distinguish words from one another and more easily recognize new words. We examined whether 17‐month‐old infants encode word stress in their familiar word representations. In Experiment 1, infants were presented with pairs of familiar objects while hearing a target label either properly pronounced with the correct stress (e.g., baby /’be?bi/) or mis‐pronounced with the incorrect stress pattern (e.g., baby /be?’bi/). Infants mapped both the correctly stressed and mis‐stressed labels to the target objects; however, they were slower to fixate the target when hearing the mis‐stressed label. In Experiment 2, we examined whether infants appreciate that stress has a nonproductive role in English (i.e., altering the stress of a word does not typically signal a change in word meaning) by presenting infants with a familiar object paired with a novel object while hearing either correctly stressed or mis‐stressed familiar words (Experiment 2). Here, infants mapped the correctly stressed label to the familiar object but did not map the mis‐stressed label reliably to either the target or distractor objects. These findings suggest that word stress impacts the processing of familiar words, and infants have burgeoning knowledge that altering the stress pattern of a familiar word does not reliably signal a new referent.     

Infants' Responses to Gender‐Inconsistent Events

Toddlers' knowledge of the stereotyping of traditionally feminine and masculine household activities was examined using the preferential looking paradigm. Seventy‐seven 24‐month‐old infants observed a series of 9 pairs of photographs, each portraying a male and female adult engaged in the same stereotyped or gender‐neutral activity (e.g., ironing, hammering, or reading). Longer looking times were predicted on stimuli inconsistent with gender stereotypes (e.g., looking longer at the man putting on lipstick than at the woman). The results suggested that toddlers have acquired some knowledge of the gender stereotyping of feminine activities by their 2nd birthday.     

Transfer of Social Learning Across Contexts: Exploring Infants' Attribution of Trait‐Like Emotions to Adults

We explored whether 15‐month‐olds expect another person's emotional disposition to be stable across social situations. In three observation trials, infants watched two adults interact. Half the infants saw one of the adults (“Emoter”) respond negatively to the other adult's actions (Anger group); half saw the Emoter respond neutrally to the same actions (Neutral group). After a change in social context, infants participated in novel tasks with the (now‐neutral) Emoter. Infants in the Anger group were significantly more likely to relinquish desirable toys to the Emoter. We hypothesize that, in the initial observation trials, infants learned that the Emoter was “anger‐prone” and expected her to get angry again in a new social situation. Consequently, infants readily gave the Emoter what she wanted. These findings reveal three key features of infants' affective cognition: (1) infants track adults' emotional history across encounters; (2) infants learn from observing how people interact with others and use this to form expectations about how these people will treat them; and (3) more speculatively, infants use appeasement to cope with social threat. We hypothesize that infants form “trait‐like” attributions about people's emotional dispositions and use this to formulate adaptive responses to adults in novel social contexts.     

Eight‐Month‐Old Infants' Perception of Possible and Impossible Events

This study investigated 8‐month‐old infants' perception of object permanence in an extension of the rotating screen studies by Baillargeon (1987) and Baillargeon, Spelke, and Wasserman (1985). Using computer‐animated stimuli similar to the “live” stimuli used by Baillargeon and her colleagues (Baillargeon, 1987; Baillargeon et al., 1985), 48 8‐month‐old infants were habituated to 1 of 4 computer‐animated events and then tested on all 4 events. The events involved a screen that rotated in either a 180° or 120° arc*** and a block that either was sitting in the path of the rotating screen or absent from the event. The results provided no evidence that infants responded on the basis of the possibility or impossibility of the events as claimed by Baillargeon and her colleagues, but instead indicated that the infants responded on the basis of perceptual novelty. These results are consistent with the findings of Schilling (this issue) and Bogartz, Shinskey, and Schilling (this issue). Taken together, along with the findings of Rivera, Wakeley, and Langer (1999), these more recent findings suggest that Baillargeon's (1987; Baillargeon et al., 1985) results should not be interpreted as definitive evidence of object permanence in very young infants.     

Transnationalism and American Exports in an English‐Speaking World1

Investigating the relationship between immigration, middleman minority status, transnationalism, and U.S. foreign trade, the authors assembled a census‐based data file that contains aggregate‐level variables for 88 foreign‐born groups by national origin between 1980 and 1990. They regressed immigrant characteristics and immigration volume upon time‐lagged import/export statistics from the same 88 nations between 1985 and 1995. Results show the independent influence on exports of immigrant entrepreneurship, transnationalism, and middleman minority status. But these variables, exhaustively derived from the existing literature, had no effect on U.S. imports; they only affected exports. The authors propose that the discrepancy between imports and exports arises because of the dominance of English as a world business language. In this situation, foreigners need no help from immigrants when they export to the United States; but native‐born, monolingual Americans need the help of bicultural immigrants when they export. The empirical results suggest that immigrant entrepreneurs enhance the United States' exports and thus reduce the United States' balance of payments deficit.     

Infants' Sensitivity to the Depth Cue of Height‐in‐the‐Picture‐Plane

Five‐ and 7‐month‐old infants' sensitivity to the pictorial depth cue of height‐in‐the‐picture‐plane was assessed. Infants were presented with 2 objects, 1 higher than the other, and their reaching was recorded under monocular and binocular viewing conditions. The results showed that both age groups reached significantly more to the lower, apparently closer object under monocular view and that they reached equally to the 2 objects under binocular view. The results suggest that both 5‐ and 7‐month‐old infants are sensitive to the depth information provided by height‐in‐the‐picture‐plane. Demonstration of pictorial depth sensitivity at 5 months has implications for the mechanism underlying the onset of sensitivity to this type of depth information.     

A Troubling Presence: Indigeneity in English‐Language Canadian Sociology

Over the past decade Canadian sociology has engaged in spirited debates on the sociology of sociological research, but it has barely begun to address its relation to Indigenous theorizing, scholarship, and politics. How does the discipline deal with the settler colonial history and current realities of Indigenous social lives, and where is the place in our field for Indigenous voices and perspectives? Drawing on Coulthard's politics of recognition and Tuck's damage‐centered research, we present here the first systematic empirical analysis of the place of Indigeneity in the Canadian Review of Sociology and the Canadian Journal of Sociology. We situate the presence of Indigeneity in Canadian sociology journals in the sociopolitical context of the time, and examine how imperialism, statism, and damage are oriented within the two journals. Most importantly, we challenge the silence in the discipline's intellectual frames and research programs with respect to Indigenous theorizing about the social world.     

12‐Month‐Old Infants' Perception of Attention Direction in Static Video Images

Twelve‐month‐old infants' ability to perceive gaze direction in static video images was investigated. The images showed a woman who performed attention‐directing actions by looking or pointing toward 1 of 4 objects positioned in front of her (2 on each side). When the model just pointed at the objects, she looked straight ahead, and when she just looked, her hands were hidden below the tabletop. An eye movement system (TOBII) was used to register the gaze of the participants. We found that the infants clearly discriminated the gaze directions to the objects. There was no tendency to mix up the 2 object positions, located 10° apart, on the same side of the model. The infants spent more time looking at the attended objects than the unattended ones and they shifted gaze more often from the face of the model to the attended object than to the unattended objects. Pointing did not significantly increase the infants' tendency to move gaze to the attended object, irrespective of whether the pointing gesture was accompanied by looking or not. In all conditions the infants spent most of the time looking at the model's face. This tendency was especially noticeable in the pointing‐only condition and the condition where the model just looked straight ahead.     

The Effect of Social Responsiveness on Infants' Object‐Directed Imitation

Previous research has demonstrated that social interactions underlie the development of object‐directed imitation. For example, infants differentially learn object action sequences from a live social partner compared to a social partner over a video monitor; however, what is not well understood is what aspects of social interactions influence social learning. Previous studies have found variable influences of different types of caregiver responsiveness on attention, language, and cognitive development. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine how the responsive style of a social partner influenced the learning of object‐directed action sequences. Infants interacted with either a sensitive or redirective experimenter before the learning trial. Results revealed infants changed their patterns of engagement; infants interacting with a sensitive experimenter had longer periods of attentional engagement than infants interacting with a redirective experimenter. Furthermore, during the learning trial, the amount of sensitivity during interaction with the social partner predicted learning scores. These findings suggest that infants' attention is influenced by social partners' interactive style during ongoing interaction, which subsequently affects how infants learn from these social partners.     

Intersensory Redundancy and 7‐Month‐Old Infants' Memory for Arbitrary Syllable‐Object Relations

Seven‐month‐old infants require redundant information, such as temporal synchrony, to learn arbitrary syllable‐object relations (Gogate & Bahrick, 1998). Infants learned the relations between 2 spoken syllables, /a/ and /i/, and 2 moving objects only when temporal synchrony was present during habituation. This article presents 2 experiments to address infants' memory for these relations. In Experiment 1, infants remembered the syllable‐object relations after 10 min, only when temporal synchrony between the vocalizations and moving objects was provided during learning. In Experiment 2, 7‐month‐olds were habituated to the same syllable‐object pairs in the presence of temporal synchrony and tested for memory after 4 days. Once again, infants learned and showed emerging memory for the syllable‐object relations 4 days after original learning under the temporally synchronous condition. These findings are consistent with the view that prior to symbolic development, infants learn and remember word‐object relations by perceiving redundant information in the vocal and gestural communication of adults.     

Maternal Depressive Symptoms and 6‐Month‐Old Infants' Sensitivity to Facial Expressions

We examined 6‐month‐old infants' abilities to discriminate smiling and frowning from neutral stimuli. In addition, we assessed the relationship between infants' preferences for varying intensities of smiling and frowning facial expressions and their mothers' history of depressive symptoms. Forty‐six infants were presented pairs of facial expressions, and their preferential looking time was recorded. They also participated in a 3‐min interaction with their mothers for which duration of both mother and infant gazing and smiling were coded. Analyses revealed that the infants reliably discriminated between varying intensities of smiling and frowning facial expressions and a paired neutral expression. In addition, infants' preferences for smiling and frowning expressions were related to self‐reports of maternal depressive symptoms experienced since the birth of the infant. Potential implications for social cognitive development are discussed.     

Effects of Contingent Reinforcement of Actions on Infants' Object‐Directed Reaching

The role of contingency learning was examined in 3‐month‐old infants' reaching movements. Infants in the experimental group experienced 9 min of active training during which they could move their arms in a reach‐like fashion to pull and move a mobile. Infants in the control group experienced 9 min of passive training during which they watched a mobile move. Prior to (pre‐training) and following the mobile experience (post‐training), infants in both conditions were given an opportunity to interact with a rattle placed within and out of their reach. Compared with infants in the control condition, infants in the experimental condition produced reach‐like movements more frequently during the mobile experience; they also showed a greater increase in reaching attempts from pre‐ to post‐training assessments with the rattle. These findings show that reinforcement of arm extensions and retractions increases the frequency of infants' reaching behaviors. This result suggests that the reinforcement of components of infants' behaviors may contribute to the successful assembly of these behaviors. This process could help keep infants engaged during the lengthy transition from prereaching to independent reaching.     

Infant‐Directed Speech Facilitates Word Segmentation

There are reasons to believe that infant‐directed (ID) speech may make language acquisition easier for infants. However, the effects of ID speech on infants' learning remain poorly understood. The experiments reported here assess whether ID speech facilitates word segmentation from fluent speech. One group of infants heard a set of nonsense sentences spoken with intonation contours characteristic of adult‐directed (AD) speech, and the other group heard the same sentences spoken with intonation contours characteristic of ID speech. In both cases, the only cue to word boundaries was the statistical structure of the speech. Infants were able to distinguish words from syllable sequences spanning word boundaries after exposure to ID speech but not after hearing AD speech. These results suggest that ID speech facilitates word segmentation and may be useful for other aspects of language acquisition as well. Issues of direction of preference in preferential listening paradigms are also considered.     

Stress Pattern Preference in Spanish‐Learning Infants: The Role of Syllable Weight

As a result of exposure, infants acquire biases that conform to the rhythmic properties of their native language. Previous lexical stress preference studies have shown that English‐ and German‐, but not French‐learning infants, show a bias toward trochaic words. The present study explores Spanish‐learning infants' lexical stress preferential patterns and the role of syllable weight at 9 months of age. Spanish is a syllable‐timed language with no vowel reduction and variable stress. Around 50% of the word types in Spanish are disyllabic, with a superior proportion of trochees than iambs (60% and 40%, respectively). Experiment 1 with CV.CV pseudo‐words failed to reveal a clear trochaic bias in 9‐month‐old Spanish‐learning infants. However, when preference was explored with items containing a heavy syllable (CVC.CV and CV.CVC, respectively), both a trochaic (Experiment 2) and an iambic preference (Experiment 3) could be elicited. These results suggest that knowledge about the close and highly regular link between heavy syllables and stress assignment in Spanish can be easily acquired and determines infants' preference at 9 months of age, while for CV.CV items, the trochaic bias appears to be weak. Our results broaden the current knowledge on the factors that determine the emergence of rhythmic biases.     

Relationship of Dyadic Closeness With Work‐Related Stress: A Daily Diary Study

We examined the association between work‐related stress of both spouses and daily fluctuations in their affective states and dyadic closeness. Daily diary data from 169 Israeli dual‐earner couples were analyzed using multilevel modeling. The findings indicate that work stress has no direct effect on dyadic closeness but rather is mediated by the spouses’ negative mood. Evidence was found for spillover of stress from work to mood at home, as well as negative crossover among couples with higher marital quality, resulting in greater distance on stressful days. Such increased distance may reflect either a deleterious effect of work stress on marital relationships or a protective mechanism used by couples in times of stress.     

The Relation between Mothers' Mirroring of Infants' Behavior and Maternal Mind‐Mindedness

Maternal mind‐mindedness, which is a measure of maternal mentalization involving mothers' speech, was examined as a predictor of mothers' mirroring of infant behavior during interaction. Five‐month‐old infants and their mothers engaged in a Still‐Face Task in which the mother's mirroring of the infant's behavior was assessed. After the task, the mother was shown a video of her infant in the task and asked to comment on what was happening for her infant; her comments were assessed for mind‐mindedness. Maternal mind‐mindedness when mothers were asked to reflect upon what was happening for their infants during the task predicted mothers' mirroring behaviors while engaged with their infants in the task. Maternal mirroring behavior may be a manifestation of maternal mentalization that is salient to infants.