Video Tasa de Succión (subtítulos)

At the Infant Language Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University the beginnings of language are
investigated usin three procedures, each is designed to explore specific types o processes at different
stages of development.
A challenge in studying any aspect of cognition during infancy is finding a way to elicit responses
from the infant that will indicate something meaningful about their perceptual and cognitive
competencies. As you will see the procedures are carefully constructed to utilize simple behaviors
that infants naturally exhibit during the first year of life namely sucking and looking
0:54
0:58 High amplitude sucking procedure
The high amplitude sucking procedure is a procedure that we've used for now almost 30 years. It's
used with very young babies and it was one of the first methods that scientists had to find out what
babies perceive with respect to speech sounds and other kinds of visual stimuli. In our experiments
we use this procedure to examine what differences babies can tell between speech sounds an much
more recently what we've been looking at is how babies begin to attend to different information in
speech sounds and what kind of information that they remember. What we do is we put the pacifier
right here in the baby's mouth and the pacifier is hooked up to a pressure transducer which gives us
an output of the baby sucking responses. We can tell how hard the baby is sucking on the pacifier.
But every baby sucks with a different amount of pressures which is assessed using a polygraph
machine in the observation rooms. Here the researcher adjusts the sensitivity of the machine to
tailor each of each infants baseline sucking intensity and frequency with this adjustment the
machine registers each suck while letting other mouth movements as undetected.
Once the baby has established a sucking rate we start to introduce a speech cell
Audio
But we play that speech down every time the the baby gives a hard suck on the pacifier. It usually
takes infants only two or three minutes to figure out what is going on in the experiment an they
once they have established that they're turning on the speech sounds they begin to suck on the
pacifier more and more often and the sounds come on more and more frequently. Now as you can
imagine after about two or three or five minutes of this, babies get a little bit bored with what
they're hearing and they're sucking rate begins to decline
move on and when it declines to a predeterminde criterion then what we do is we introduce a new
period or new phase into our experiment.
Researcher can either continue to play the same sounds and those infants would provide information
on how they respond to unchanging stimuli in effect creating a control group or for other infants
new sounds can be introduced now even two month olds like novelty so it's expected that if babies
perceive the difference in the sounds the sucking rate will increase and it usually does
In order to tell if babies actually remember the information that they're hearing we usually
introduce a short two minute period in which we play no sounds whatsoever but instead the baby
gets to watch a series of colorful slides. Then we pick up with playing speech sounds over again and
if the baby remembers what he or she heard during the first part of the experiment then we expected
that when change the sounds they'll react to that kind of change and they'll begin to suck at a higher
array all
All pacifiers are new and sterilized they are held by an assistant who wears headphones playing
masking music keeping him or her blind to the condition of the infant and parents are abled to
observe the entire procedure by watching their child's reflection in a mirror
¿cues? the kinds of things that we study using the high amplitude sucking procedure really have to
do with basic capacities that all infants have to learn any language
T is for top is spins on its tip
and indeed it has been shown that babies have a lot of capabilities within the first or three months of
age; but these abilities are universal in the sense that we expect to find them in from infants in
infants from any culture what happens though is that around five or six months of age babies begin
to learn more about the particulars of their own native language
Do you see a monkey
And in this area that would be english for most families then we can start to ask different kinds of
questions about what they're learning about their native language now because the high amplitude
sucking procedure only works with infants that are about two or three months of age we have to use
other kinds of procedures to be able to ask these kinds of questions about what babies are learning
about their native learning
5:21