Name:Kali, Woodruff Carr

School/Affiliation:Boston Children's Hospital/Northwestern University

Co-Authors:Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden, Laurel Trainor, Sandra Waxman

Virtual or In-person:Virtual

Short Bio:

My research program is focused on the biology of learning and how the cascading forces of development and experience come together to shape our perception of and interactions with the world around us. My research spans several areas related to audition, with recent research topics including: 1) how children use temporal rhythmic cues to make sense of speech and music, 2) how participant- and training-related factors influence auditory learning, 3) how infants learn to identify the sounds that are "for them" and use these sounds for thinking and reasoning, and 4) early biopsychosocial predictors of late talking.

Abstract:

Speech and music are key components of caregiver-infant interactions and are crucial for cognitive, social, and emotional development. However, speech and music differ in acoustic features that may uniquely capture infants’ attention and scaffold cognitive development. Prior work shows that listening to speech supports infants’ object categorization throughout the first year. Here, we investigate whether humming and singing confer the same cognitive advantage. Infants (2-7 months) viewed images from the same category (e.g., eight fish), each paired with a recording of an infant-directed labeling phrase, either hummed or sung. We then assessed categorization using a looking preference test: infants viewed novel exemplars from the now-familiar category and a novel category (e.g., a dinosaur). Infants in the hummed condition failed to form a category. In contrast, 2- to 4-month-olds in the sung condition showed categorization and an earlier (~20 days) transition from a familiarity preference to novelty preference compared to infants in the speech condition. This indicates that singing may initially increase infants’ cognitive efficiency. However, by 7 months, this advantage disappeared, suggesting that older infants have learned that singing is not typically associated with object labeling. Together, these results suggest that suprasegmental properties of the native language alone are not sufficient, and that speech-specific articulatory and high-frequency spectral cues may be essential features of sounds that young infants link to cognition.