Young infants are very sensitive to feature distribution information in the environment. However, existing work suggests that they do not make use of correlation information to form certain perceptual categories until at least 7 months of age. We suggest that the failure to use correlation information is a by-product of familiarization procedures…

The present research examined alternative accounts of prior violation-of-expectation (VOE) reports that young infants can represent and reason about hidden objects. According to these accounts, young infants' apparent success in these VOE tasks reflects only novelty and familiarity preferences induced by the habituation or familiarization trials…

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

Observed 12-month olds, with their mothers and independently, acting on objects from home and objects brought by the experimenter as new exemplars of previous toys. Found that conventional actions were more frequent in joint than in independent activity. In independent activity, conventional actions were more frequent with customary than with…

Examined effect of familiarization on 3.5-month-olds' retention of visual stimuli with varying delay times. Found support for retention models in which direction of attentional preferences (novel, familiar, or null) depends on memory accessibility. Short lookers showed better retention over time than long lookers, indicating that much of the…

Background: People are better at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of another race. Such race specificity may be due to differential expertise in the two races. Method: In order to find out whether this other-race effect develops as early as face-recognition skills or whether it is a long-term effect of acquired expertise, we tested…

During the first year of life, infants' perception of speech becomes tuned to the phonology of the native language, as revealed in laboratory discrimination and categorization tasks using syllable stimuli. However, the implications of these results for the development of the early vocabulary remain controversial, with some results suggesting that…

Studied feeding-related arousal effects on a visual recognition paired-comparison task at newborn, 1, and 4 months of age. Found that newborns and 1-month olds shifted from a familiarity preference before feeding to a novelty preference after feeding. Control-group testing confirmed that shift was not due to increased stimulus exposure. By 4…

Two experiments examined memory of 7-month-olds after 2-week retention interval for passages of two Mozart movements heard daily for 2 weeks. Results suggested that the infants retained familiarized music in long-term memory and that their listening preferences were affected by the extent to which familiar passages were removed from the musical…

Assessed infants' attachment behaviors toward nonparental adults, including grandparents, other relatives, and family friends. Found that the extent of infants' attachment behavior to nonparental adults was related to infant-mother attachment behavior and to the nonparental adult's responsiveness in teaching and position in the mother's social…

Used event-related potentials (ERPs) and fixation duration to examine infants' responses to events. Found that ERPs, but not looking time, distinguished between familiar events presented frequently rather than infrequently, and between familiar and novel events presented infrequently. Proposed that ERPs reflected updating of working memory or…

Eye movements of 12-week-old infants were recorded in a visual encoding experiment. Results showed that infants who encoded more slowly scanned less extensively over the stimulus and engaged in prolonged fixation. An experiment with two-week olds showed significant age differences in the manner of visual scanning. (BC)

Two experiments used paired-comparisons to investigate 3-month olds' recognition of dynamic visual events after various retention intervals. Results indicated a changing pattern of attentional preferences over time consistent with models of infant recognition memory in which novelty, familiarity, and null preferences are considered conjointly and…

Infants prefer to listen to happy speech. To assess influences of speech affect on early lexical processing, 7.5- and 10.5-month-old infants were familiarized with one word spoken with happy affect and another with neutral affect and then tested on recognition of these words in fluent passages. Infants heard all passages either with happy affect…

Two experiments sought to extend the demonstration of English-learning infants' abilities to segment nouns from fluent speech to a new lexical class: verbs. Moreover, we explored whether two factors previously shown to influence noun segmentation, stress pattern (strong-weak or weak-strong) and type of initial phoneme (consonant or vowel), also…