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Abstract

Humans are remarkably good at recognizing speakers by their voice, and this ability develops already in early infancy. This inspires the question of whether voice information affects speech acquisition in early development. Since infants are typically exposed mainly to their constant caregivers, infants might be especially drawn to voice information from familiar speakers. Previous research confirms that learning from a familiar voice as opposed to an unfamiliar voice supports word learning in adults (Goldinger et al., 1991), speech stream separation in infants (Barker & Newman, 2004), and phoneme recognition in adults (Levi et al., 2011). Whether the voice familiarity benefit exists for phoneme acquisition in infants remains elusive. In this presentation, we will present the experimental design for a study that aims to test whether infants’ phoneme learning benefits from a familiar voice. Our experiment will test 3-month-old infants on phoneme learning and consists of three parts. (1) Infants will be familiarized with a speaker’s voice by means of audio recordings, taking place at the infant’s home over the course of two weeks. (2) In the laboratory, infants will be repeatedly exposed to a vowel contrasts, either spoken by an unfamiliar speaker, or by the speaker they were familiarized with (familiar speaker), (3) In an electrophysiological study, we will then test the infant’s discrimination of the vowel contrast, and whether discrimination is modulated by voice familiarity. We hypothesize that the contrast spoken by the familiar speaker as opposed to the unfamiliar speaker will reveal more pronounced discrimination responses.