Infants in cocktail parties

Abstract

Most work on listeners’ ability to separate streams of speech has focused on adults. Yet infants also find themselves in noisy environments. In order to learn from their caregivers’ speech in these settings, they must first separate it from background noise such as that from television shows and siblings. Previous work has found that 7.5‐month‐old infants can separate streams of speech when the target voice is more intense than the distractor voice (Newman and Jusczyk, 1996), when the target voice is known to the infant (Barker and Newman, 2000) or when infants are presented with an audiovisual (rather than auditory‐only) signal (Hollich, Jusczyk, and Newman, 2001). Unfortunately, the paradigm in these studies can only be used on infants at least 7.5 months of age, limiting the ability to investigate how stream segregation develops over time. The present work uses a new paradigm to explore younger infants’ ability to separate streams of speech. Infants aged 4.5 months heard a female talker repeat either t...