Infants' Understanding of Goal Directed Behavior

87 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.As adults, we interpret the actions of others as directed towards goals and we use that goal information to help make sense of others' actions. Infants as young as 5 months of age understand some of the repeated actions of others as directed toward the goal of obtaining a specific object (Woodward, 1998). What are some of the limitations on infants' ability to attribute goals to the actions of others? The current experiments demonstrate that by 10.5 months of age, infants understand that there is flexibility in how goals may be achieved---they were able to encode a toy sought by an actor as her goal object, even when it was obtained by different means on different trials. Slightly older 14-month-old infants understood the flexibility of goals along a different dimension; they were able to keep track of the separate goals of different actors. Given that infants were able to detect the goals of others under a variety of circumstances, would infants also be able to incorporate others' beliefs when making sense of their behavior? 15-month-old infants were found to succeed at versions of both true and false belief tasks; when a toy changed locations and an actor reached for the toy in its new location, infants looked longer when the actor had not than when she had observed the change of location. These results may be accounted for by a framework in which infants build psychological representations for predicting the actions of others. Initially, the representation includes the goal the actor is trying to attain and the physical situation in which the action occurs. With age (and/or experience) infants include additional contextual information into their psychological representations, allowing for more accurate prediction of others' actions.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Acoustic correlates of allophonic versus phonemic dimensions in monolingual and bilingual infants’ input

A B S T R A C T Allophones are diverse phonetic instantiations of a single underlying sound category. As such, they pose a peculiar problem for infant language learners: These variants occur in the ambient language, but they are not used to encode lexical contrasts. Infants' sensitivity to sounds varying along allophonic dimensions declines by 11 months of age, suggesting that there must be information to phonological status available to pre-lexical infants. The present work tests one specific type of information: acoustic implementation. It was hypothesized that the acoustic distance between two vowel categories is smaller when the dimension along which the two vowels differ is allophonic (e.g., vowel nasality in American English, vowel tenseness in Quebec French) compared to when it is phonemic (e.g., vowel tenseness in American English, vowel nasality in Quebec French). Monolingual mothers speaking either English or French and bilingual mothers speaking both languages were recorded while they described objects to their 11-month-olds. Results provided weak support for the main hypothesis

The acoustic properties of bilingual infant-directed speech

Abstract: Does the acoustic input for bilingual infants equal the conjunction of the input heard by monolinguals of each separate language? The present letter tackles this question, focusing on maternal speech addressed to 11-month-old infants, on the cusp of perceptual attunement. The acoustic characteristics of the point vowels /a,i,u/ were measured in the spontaneous infant-directed speech of French-English bilingual mothers, as well as in the speech of French and English monolingual mothers. Bilingual caregivers produced their two languages with acoustic prosodic separation equal to that of the monolinguals, while also conveying distinct spectral characteristics of the point vowels in their two languages