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How and when do infants understand Ethnicity?| old_uid | 7314 |
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| title | How and when do infants understand Ethnicity? |
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| start_date | 2009/07/16 |
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| schedule | 13h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The ability to discriminate phonemic contrasts that are absent in the infants native language declines towards the end of the first year of life (Werker & Tees, 1984). Infants' ability to recognize both own-race and other-race faces is found at 6 months of age but is limited to own race from 9-month of age (Kelly et al., 2007). Infants are also sensitive to events which are bimodally specified. This is the integration of information from two sense modalities into a single percept. Using such information, young infants are able to correctly match sound and vision to identify the appropriate moving object (Spelke, 1979), the gender of the speaker (Poulin-Dubois, et al. , 1995; Patterson and Werker, 2002), as well as the age of the speaker (Bahrick et al, 1998) and also to discriminate between emotions (Walker-Andrews and Lennon, 1991). They are also able to make assumptions about categories by matching intermodal information from pictures and sounds that they have little or no experience with early in life. This ability will then be lost by the end of the first year of life. For example, Lewkowicz and Ghazanfar (2006) have shown that whereas 4- and 6-month-old show inter-sensory matching for monkey faces and monkey calls, 8- and 10-month-old infants do not. Weikum et al. (2007) found that 4- and 6-month-old discriminate visually French from English. This ability disappears in monolingual 8-month-old infants who only discriminate the visual attributes of their own language. Bilingual 8-month-olds maintain the ability to discriminate between their native language and a non-native language. We can conclude that infants have a representation and an expectation about human (Bonatti et al., 2002) that is changing rapidly with experience during the first years of life. How precise is the human representation? Does it extend to language and culture? Ethnicity and language are examples of a naturally occurring category, we differ both in face morphology, skin tone and speech. Will infants expect an own race face to speak their native language and an other-race face to speak a non-native language? |
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| responsibles | Lœvenbruck, Welby |
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