Name:Meyha, Chhatwal

School/Affiliation:University of Toronto

Co-Authors:Katerina Ikonomakis, Dr. Christina M. Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden, Dr. Laura K. Cirelli

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Short Bio:

Meyha is a PhD student in Psychology and the Collaborative Program in Neuroscience at the University of Toronto, co-supervised by Drs. Laura Cirelli and Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden. Meyha is interested in the relationship between music and cognitive development across the lifespan, with her current work focusing on how music may facilitate infant language acquisition in social contexts. She hopes to use both neural and behavioural measures to examine such interactions in the lab.

Abstract:

The highly social exchanges between babies and their parents provide a rich context for early word learning. While infants mostly hear language through speech, live infant directed song is particularly effective at capturing infant attention, regulating emotion, and facilitating bonding, which may all support word learning. Indeed, older toddlers, children and adults learn word-object pairings more effectively from song than speech. However, this has not yet been investigated in a live context or in younger infants. Here, we investigate how word learning differs for infants across song and speech and explore whether emotional arousal predicts learning. In the Learning Phase, 12- to 14-month-old infants will sit on their parent's lap while the experimenter presents 16 novel object-word pairings. Pairs will be presented in one of four vocal modalities: playsong, lullaby, playful speech, or soothing speech. In the Test Phase, infant learning will be assessed using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPLP). On each test trial, infants will hear one target word while they are presented with videos of the correct object on one side and a distractor on the other. We predict that words presented via song will be better retained, and that high arousal conditions (playsong, playful prose) will better facilitate learning compared to low arousal conditions. Our focus on naturalistic, dyadic interactions emphasizes the critical role of face-to-face musical and non-musical exchanges in shaping infant language development. These results will have theoretical and practical implications for early word learning, attention, and musical engagement.