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Current Understandings of Microaggressions: Impacts on Individuals and Society
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Infants link language and cognition, whether the language is spoken or a sign language
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Birdsong baffles babies
The blue-eyed black lemur (
Elemur flavirons) may be a close genetic cousin of ours, but these small, lanky tree-dwellers, with their long bushy tails and opposable toes, are sufficiently different that you wouldn’t expect a baby to recognise them as part of the family.
But scientists searching for the boundary line between which animal voices help babies learn – and which don’t – have found that non-human primate calls, like that of the lemur, stimulate human babies’ cognition just as much as human voices do, while birdsong has no notable effect.
The new study, published in
PLOS ONE, explored whether birdsong from the zebra finch (
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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,
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Zebra finch songs do not assist human infants in developing their nascent cognitive skills. Credit: Getty Images
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The ability to link language to the world around us is a crowning feature of our species. For very young infants, it is not yet about learning the meaning of words like “cat” or “dog.” Rather, the acoustic signals in speech help foster infants fundamental cognitive capacities, including the formation of categories of objects, such as cats or dogs.
The sounds that activate this key step in development can come not just from human language but also from vocalizations made by nonhuman primates. A new study shows that babies do not use just any natural sound to build cognition, however. While primate calls and human language pass the test, birdsongs do not.
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