Name:Arina Shandala

School/Affiliation:International Doctorate for Experimental Approaches to Language and Brain (IDEALAB), University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany; Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands; Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Co-Authors:Enikő Ladányi, Mridula Sharma, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan

Virtual or In-person:Virtual

Short Bio:

Arina Shandala is a PhD student of Psychological Sciences in the joint-degree program IDEALAB at Macquarie University and the University of Potsdam (Germany). Bridging early language acquisition and musical development, she uses experimental methods, such as eye tracking, to investigate how children learn new words from children’s songs, and how their word learning relates to early musicality.

Abstract:

Infant-directed singing is an important communicative feature in caregiver-infant interaction that potentially provides infants with a source of linguistic information. Nonetheless, little is known about how infants process words in songs. Our study aimed to investigate infants’ skill of extracting words from the continuous acoustic signal of infant-directed playsongs. Using a central fixation paradigm, German-learning 8-9 and 11-12-month-olds (n = 67) were familiarised with playsongs that contained repetitions of a pseudoword. Then, we tested their recognition of the pseudowords by measuring their looking times at the screen while listening to the isolated spoken pseudowords that either had (familiar) or had not occurred (novel) during familiarisation. Additionally, we collected data on infants' musical experience, parental music background, verbal responsiveness, and socioeconomic status (SES). Analyses of the looking times during the test phase demonstrated a significant listening preference for novel over familiar words in the 11-12-month-old group. In contrast, no preference was detected in the 8-9-month-old group, indicating that at a group level, 8-9-month-olds were not successful in our experimental task. Exploratory analysis of music-related questionnaire scores revealed no links with the segmentation performance in either of the groups. Our results highlight the functionality of playsongs for infants, a song genre whose value for early language learning is commonly assumed but has rarely been addressed in the experimental setting. Additionally, these findings shed light on age-related effects associated with the processing of speech in the sung modality in early infancy.