Abstract
This study investigated whether acoustic input, in the form of infant-directed speech, influenced infants' segmenting of action sequences. Thirty-two 7.5- to 11.5-month-old infants were familiarized with video sequences made up of short action clips. Narration coincided with portions of the action stream to package certain pairs of clips together. At test, packaged and nonpackaged pairs of actions were presented side by side in silence. Narration heard during familiarization influenced how infants viewed the action units, such that at test, infants older than 9.5 months (but not younger) looked longer at the nonpackaged than the packaged action sequences. The role of infant-directed speech as well as other types of acoustic input in assisting infants' processing of action is discussed.
Notes
We thank Dare Baldwin and Annika Andersson for the video clip stimuli.
2To further ensure that preference for a single action could not have accounted for the pair-level effect, an additional analysis was performed. If preference for a single action were to drive the pair-level preference we found, it must be that infants seek out the preferred single action at the start of a trial and then continue to look at that side of the screen. This pattern was not observed in the data; infants' first look during each trial did not predict their overall looking.