Patterns in Frequency and Pitch

I especially appreciated the article “Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants” by Saffran, Aslin, and Newport. It was interesting to read more evidence that what infants are first hearing and discerning are patterns in speech. This makes sense to me because this is a standard method of decryption or understanding and categorizing a new and unfamiliar observation. An infant has to learn to identify separate words, and has to figure out how to assign meaning to the words once they are identified.

I also found it very interesting that infants could identify differences between a string of nonsense words, and the same string with some errors. The infants are recognizing familiar patterns, and learning to separate those out from the rest of the unfamiliar sounds. The article also mentions that infants use the pattern of sounds (as in the phrase “pretty#baby”) to identify where one word ends and another starts.

A similar concept and learning tool that has been discussed in many of my psych classes is motherese (Infant Directed Talk). This form of speaking is slower and does tend to use smaller words, but I think the most significant and helpful aspect is the “sing-song”-like nature of the speech. A previous class showed a video from a study involving mothers from different cultures and languages. The mothers were recorded while talking with their infant. There were four basic types of communication found: soothing, attention-getting, cautioning/saying no, and I think the fourth was questioning, but I cannot recall.

What fascinated me about this study was that when the pitch of the mother’s voice was analyzed, the same pattern was found to apply to the same meaning of the speech, regardless of the language (unfortunately, I cannot recall the specific study). Other studies have indicated that infants pay more attention to IDT as opposed to normal adult-directed speech, and that they understand more when listening to IDT (again, I don’t remember the name or authors of the study).

This information suggests to me that tone and pitch is another way infants analyze patterns in language when they are learning to understand the sounds around them.