February 16, 1995: Vol26n17: Baby knows his name - even at 4 1/2 months

By SUE WUETCHER
News Bureau Staff
Infants as young as 4-1/2 months can recognize their own names, even
picking them out from similar-sounding names, UB psychologists have
found.
	Research presented in June at the Acoustical Society of
America meeting by UB doctoral student Denise Mandel; Peter W.
Jusczyk, UB professor of psychology, and David Pisoni of the Indiana
University Department of Psychology suggests that in the first few
months of life, infants begin to build a vocabulary in their native
language.
	In the study, 24 infants sat on their parents' laps in a
three-sided booth. Four names, including each child's own name, were
played through loudspeakers on both sides of the booth. The infants
were scored on the length of time they looked in the direction of the
loudspeakers. They had to make a head turn of at least 30 degrees in
order to be scored.
	Two of the names the infants heard were quite different from
their own name, but the third name had the same rhythm and intonation
as the infant's name. For example, an infant named "Corey" might hear
"Henry" as a name with a similar rhythm and intonation, and "Marie"
and "Elaine" as names with different rhythm and intonation.
	The researchers found that the infants listened significantly
longer to repetitions of their own names than to any of the other
names.
	This finding has important implications for children's early
vocabulary, Mandel says. "With their name being one of the first sound
patterns infants recognize, it may influence other types of sounds
they begin to pick up," she says.
	Earlier studies by Jusczyk-published in the Journal of Memory
and Language and Child Development-indicate that infants as young as 6
months start developing a sensitivity to the prosodic qualities of
language-such as stress, intonation and rhythm-before they develop a
sensitivity to the phonetic qualities.
	Moreover, infants' reliance on the prosodic cues of language
help them segment the continuous speech they hear around them into
individual words and becomes the basis for developing a lexicon,
Jusczyk's research has found.