Abstract
Children’s songs are omnipresent and highly attractive stimuli in infants’ input. Previous work suggests that infants process linguistic–phonetic information from simplified sung melodies. The present study investigated whether infants learn words from ecologically valid children’s songs. Testing 40 Dutch-learning 10-month-olds in a familiarization-then-test electroencephalography (EEG) paradigm, this study asked whether infants can segment repeated target words embedded in songs during familiarization and subsequently recognize those words in continuous speech in the test phase. To replicate previous speech work and compare segmentation across modalities, infants participated in both song and speech sessions. Results showed a positive event-related potential (ERP) familiarity effect to the final compared to the first target occurrences during both song and speech familiarization. No evidence was found for word recognition in the test phase following either song or speech. Comparisons across the stimuli of the present and a comparable previous study suggested that acoustic prominence and speech rate may have contributed to the polarity of the ERP familiarity effect and its absence in the test phase. Overall, the present study provides evidence that 10-month-old infants can segment words embedded in songs, and it raises questions about the acoustic and other factors that enable or hinder infant word segmentation from songs and speech.
Highlights
Parents across cultures sing songs, words sung to a tune, for their infants
In the familiarization phase, we identified a positive event-related potential (ERP) familiarity effect over the left-frontal electrodes in both the 250–500 and 600–800 ms time windows
The present study set out to test whether infants are able to segment words from ecologically valid children’s songs and transfer these units to recognition in the spoken register
Summary
Parents across cultures sing songs, words sung to a tune, for their infants. They sing lullabies to soothe and comfort, and they often sing play songs to try and make their babies laugh [1]. While parents initially sing for affect regulation and social engagement, they add didactic reasons around their infant’s 10th month [2]. Could songs be beneficial for vocabulary learning?. Research so far has not yet convincingly shown that infants can use actual children’s songs to learn actual language. The songs used in previous experiments had lyrics of only four or five words and consistently paired syllables with a single pitch pattern throughout the song, not reflecting the lyrical and musical complexity of actual children’s songs.
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