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Researchers Challenge Conventional Wisdom That Human Cognitive Functions Improve As We Grow
The team has studied English-learning infants in the US and Spanish-learning infants in Spain.
The research team-including experts from the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science at Florida Atlantic University and the Universities of Barcelona and Pompeu Fabra in Spain, say that they carried out the study to determine whether English- and Spanish-learning infants could perceive people's facial speech gestures and accompanying vocalizations as part of the same event.
According to them, the ability do this is crucial for adaptive communication.
The researchers hypothesized that younger infants may actually be better at integrating facial speech gestures and vocalizations than older infants and that the developmental decline in this ability may be due to increasing specialization for native-language phonology as infants learn their own speech and language.
"Our hypothesis is contrary to conventional wisdom because it assumes that perceptual abilities improve as infants develop. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that younger infants could integrate the facial and vocal gestures of foreign speech sounds, but that older infants no longer did," said Dr. David J. Lewkowicz, professor of psychology in FAU's College of Science, who carried out this research with Drs. Ferran Pons, Salvador Soto-Faraco and Nuria Sebastian-Galles from Spain.
The researchers say that theirs is the first study to provide evidence that perception of audiovisual non-native speech narrows during infancy, precisely during the time that infants are acquiring their native language phonological system.
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