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Infants as young as five months old can detect sources of speech, according to an NYU professor.
Assistant Psychology professor Athena Vouloumanos and a team of researchers published a new study, which found that infants can correctly attribute human speech to humans and monkey calls to monkeys.
"The big question here is how infants learn language," Vouloumanos said. "They have a preference for speech at a really young age."
Vouloumanos said the study shows that infants may be able to match sounds to the vocal tracts from which they originate and added that a follow-up study may explore the "coupling of acoustics and articulation more directly."
A key finding of the study was that infants were not able to recognize other human sounds, such as laughter, as they did speech.
"Speech might be special to infants," she said. "Five-month-olds are sophisticated in their ability to match faces to voices."
Vouloumanos added that she also wants to explore how infants would react to speech produced by computers or talking birds.
Vouloumanos said she first became interested in infant development as an approach to studying language acquisition.
"Development is an approach to studying origins and processes of change," she said. "It allows me to examine a species' intellectual behavior in a natural environment."
The researcher's findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
