PSYC 302: midterm 2 extra readings + guest lectures

includes erica flaten's research

main findings of Soley et al.:

examined whether infants with different cultural backgrounds would exhibit culture-specific preferences for musical sequences on the basis of meter

• musical preferences vary depending on infants’ cultural background

• both regularity and familarity contribute to listening preferences

• early preferences for musical sequencs may also be influenced by metrical ratio simplicity

importance of rhythm in development

• auditory rhythms prime infants for language development

• developmental disorders are associated with rhythm deficits

• greater experience with mysical rhythm predicts language outcomes

• musical rhythms faciliate coordinated interactions

true or false:

7 month olds can discriminate to metres, duple (groups of 2 beats) and triple (groups of 3 beats) with or without habituation

true

mismatch response (MMR)

slow frontally positive response (~200-400ms)

• elicited by unexpected deviant sound amonst expected standard sounds

• violation of expectation/error detection

current findings of dr. flaten’s experiment:

• ½ participants primed with duple metre and other ½ with triple metre

larger MMR (regardless of beat position) for infants of musically experienced parents

overall findings from studies of enculturation and attunement

• stronger bias in MMR to the beat 5 (duple) deviant in infants taking regular music classes

• strong bias to beat 5 in adults, regardless of paying attention to duple or triple metre, especially westerners

true or false:

stronger neural tracking of speech at phoneme, syllable, and prosodic/stress levels does not equal to better comprehension/perception in adults

false

what type of brain wave tracks phonemes?

gamma band

what type of brain wave tracks syllables

theta band

what type of brain wave tracks prosodic/stress rate?

delta wave

true or false:

infants’ brains strongly track low-frequency (prosodic) content in infant-directed compared to adult-directed speech

true

preliminary findings of dr. erica flaten’s research:

rhythmic regularity in ID speech during object labelling should facilitate early word learning, by means of enhancing neural tracking (in delta and theta)

• regular: regular inter-onset intervals between words

• irregular: inter-onset intervals jittered in time

not clear if learning at group level

vowel harmony

phenomenon where all vowels within some domain are similar across some dimension relevant to the sound inventory of language

• ex. all vowels in one word are high vowels

describe infants and their sensitivity to vowel harmony at 6 months

infants whose language exhibits vowel harmony are sensitive to these patterns

• preferring harmonic disyllabic words at 6 months

• including multilingual infants

multilingual 9-11 month olds and word segmentation of native language

they can use harmony cues to segment target word when embedded in a disharmonic context

• BUT in a harmonic context

true or false:

4 month old infants learning languages without vowel harmony prefer listening to disharmonic vowels over harmonic words. they continue to show this preference by 8 months

false

true or false:

7 month old english-hearing monolingual infants can use vowel harmony as cues to segment a continuous speech stream.

true

true or false:

when segmenting words

• 7 month old english monolingual infants rely more on statistical cues than prosodic cues

• 9 month olds prefer prosodic cues

true

altercentric bias

leads infants to prioritize encoding socially cued targets

• their own visual perspective will be encoded relatively less strongly

findings from Kampis et al. (2026)

• examined whether infants’ processing of conceptual information is also subject to altercentric bias

altercentric bias influenced infants’ conceptual knowledge as shown by differnces in N400 for incongruent object lables

• but only when the incongruency was for the other person’s perspective