Inside the Infant Mind:

A predictive processing approach to the mutual interaction between vocal exploration and speech processing during phonological development

Abstract

A central question in the study of human development concerns the nature of the processes that enable infants to discover the structure of their immediate environment. Infants at an early point in development have been shown to possess powerful statistical learning capacities that allow them to extract information and to form expectations about probabilistic outcomes. The majority of this research on infants’ speech processing abilities, however, treats infants as passive recipients of stimuli by using habituation and violation-of-expectation paradigms. This talk presents experimental evidence to suggest that infants’ vocal exploration exerts a systematic impact on their processing of the speech stream and outlines how a new methodology allows investigation of the mutual interaction between infants’ statistical learning capacities and vocal exploration during development.

About the speaker

Christopher Martin Mikkelsen Cox, PhD Student

School of Communication and Culture - Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics and

Interacting Minds Centre