Abstract for Athena Vouloumanos's talk

Speech as signal for infants
Athena Vouloumanos (New York University)
February 26, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - ; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Spoken language is a rich signal for adult language users.  When we hear speech, we can use its form and its content to make inferences about the originating source of the sound (presumably a human being), and that person’s knowledge, emotional state, intentions, and beliefs about the world.  In this sense, the speech signal communicates its source and something about the mental state of its producer.  What do infants understand about the communicative potential of speech?  In this talk, I will explore the types of information that infants can glean from the speech signal.  Specifically, I will present a series of studies that examine whether very young infants have biases for listening to speech as compared to other sounds, whether infants have expectations about the source of speech and other vocalizations and whether infants expect that speech is a privileged sound in allowing humans to communicate about their mental states.