Evidence against continuous variables driving numerical discrimination in infancy

Evidence against continuous variables driving numerical discrimination in infancy

Over the past decades, abundant evidence has amassed that demonstrates infants' sensitivity to changes in number. Nonetheless, a prevalent view is that infants are more sensitive to continuous properties of stimulus arrays such as surface area and contour length than they are to numerosity. Very little research, however, has directly addressed infants' sensitivity to contour. Here we used a cha...

Evidence for knowledge-based category discrimination in infancy.

Two studies examined whether infants' category discrimination in an object-examination task was based solely on an ad hoc analysis of perceptual similarities among the experimental stimuli. In Experiment 1A, 11-month-olds examined four different exemplars of one superordinate category (animals or furniture) twice, followed by a new exemplar of the familiar category and an exemplar of the contra...

Visual language discrimination in infancy.

This study shows that 4- and 6-month-old infants can discriminate languages (English from French) just from viewing silently presented articulations. By the age of 8 months, only bilingual (French-English) infants succeed at this task. These findings reveal a surprisingly early preparedness for visual language discrimination and highlight infants' selectivity for retaining only necessary percep...

Societal Discrimination against Muslims in Europe: Racism and Political Opportunism

Discrimination of voice onset time in infancy.

In an effort to determine whether infants can discriminate speech sounds on the basis of a single acoustic cue, timing onset of periodic voicing, two experiments were conducted employing synthetic speech sounds. Naturally produced syllable pairs were also used for comparison. In the first experiment infants evidenced discrimination of a naturally produced /ba/ versus /pa/ pair and a naturally /...