Golan, J. 1 , George, R. 1 , Vitkovitch, M. 1 , Moore, D. 2 & Kushnerenko, E. 1
1 University of East London
2 University of Surrey
Infants can selectively attend to their mother's voice, even among background distractors. However, can they process speech sounds when they compete with equally salient auditory stimuli?
Twenty infants, aged between 5 and 7 months participated in our study. They sat on their parent's lap watching a silent cartoon, while the sounds were played in the background. They were exposed to two simultaneous auditory streams.
The saline EEG net was used to collect ERP responses to auditory change in each of the streams. The change in the speech sounds was recorded between phonemes /ba/ and /da/, while the tone stream involved a change in frequency between 100 and 300 Hertz.
Infants in our study were able to process change in both the speech and non-speech streams. This indicates that infants are able to process speech sounds, even if they attend to other competing sounds in the environment at the same time. This extends previous research suggesting that they can ignore irrelevant auditory information when processing speech. Our study shows that they can attend to and assess all auditory information from the environment and process speech even if it is placed among other competing sounds.