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EVANSTON, Ill., - A new study by Northwestern University researchers finds that although human and non-human primate vocalizations facilitate core cognitive processes in very young human infants, birdsong does not.
Northwestern scientists in the departments of psychology at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and communication sciences and disorders at the School of Communication, have new evidence documenting that not all naturally produced vocalizations support cognition in infants.
The new study, Birdsong fails to support object categorization in human infants, will publish in
PLOS ONE at 1 p.m. CST, Thursday, March 11.
Ample evidence documents that infants as young as three- and four-months of age have begun to link the language they hear to the objects that surround them. Listening to their native language boosts their success in forming categories of objects (e.g., dog). Object categorization, the ability to identify commonalities among objects (e.g., Fido,