Undergraduate Research at Virginia Tech

Whatever You Want, Baby: A Study of Infant Accent Preference

By Sarah Hawes, biology

Krisztina Varga< was a typical undergraduate in that she had a wide range of interests in her chosen field of study, which is psychology. One of her particular interests had been infant development, so she chose to take developmental psychology her junior year. A friend in the class who had worked in Virginia Tech's Infant Perception Lab told Varga about an opening in the lab for a student researcher. She pursued this position, and was accepted into the lab. During her senior year, Varga worked under the guidance of Robin Panneton, associate professor of psychology, to complete her honors thesis exploring infant discrimination between, and preference for, spoken accents.

There have been numerous studies about what infants pay attention to when it comes to speech. Speech rate, gender of the speaker, language, etc. have all been tested for infant response. Panneton, together with Denis Burnham, director of the Macarthur Auditory Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, generated the idea for the first study of infant preference for native accents. This is the study Varga assisted in. Panneton's Australian colleagues provided the accent stimulus different from our own, and the experiment began.

Research participants for this experiment averaged about six months of age, both at Virginia Tech and in the Australian lab. Varga's study was designed to determine if these infants would detect a difference between American and Australian accents, just as a previous study she had read explored infant differentiation between an American and a British accent. Since prior studies have shown that infants can differentiate between accents, her study took this research question one step further, aiming also to determine which accent would be preferred by her young research subjects. Infants were exposed to recordings of several American and several Australian mothers talking to their infants. The study was paralleled in Australia, where Australian infants were tested with the same recordings. Babies were monitored for overt reactions, and were hooked up to electrodes to monitor physiological reactions to the recordings.

Asked what her specific responsibilities were, Varga said, "pretty much everything." This does seem to be the case. She was responsible for recruiting willing parents, testing infants, collecting and entering data into data bases, and preparing a polished thesis paper to present the results.

Varga's favorite activities were interacting with the parents and infants. Babies are just plain cute, of course, but the parents were really interested in the research, and were a lot of fun to talk to, she said. Frustrations arose when participants agreed to come in, but turned out to be no-shows. Aside from the occasional unreliable subject and inevitable bouts with writer's block on the thesis, Varga's research ran smoothly and was enjoyable.

Results showed, as expected, that infants can tell the difference between American and Australian English. So, who would our babies prefer to listen to, Indiana Jones or Crocodile Dundee? In forming a hypothesis, Varga had to consider that stimulus novelty or familiarity could explain infant preference in either direction. Her hypothesis before the experiment was that familiarity would win out, but this was not shown in the results. Instead, there was a statistically significant preference for an Australian accent by the American subjects. Sorry Indiana Jones. In the Australian sample, the infants who heard American first preferred American over their native Australian; however, infants who heard Australian first showed differences in attention to either accent type.

Varga defended her honors thesis to the psychology department, and presented her results at an undergraduate research symposium. She says that her research was "definitely a positive experience," although tough at times. It sure seems to have paid off in terms of lending her direction after graduation, as she is still busily working with Virginia Tech's Infant Perception Lab, running follow up studies with six- and eight-month-olds (along with VT-Prep* scholar Maria Diehl). Varga's current study uses recordings of the same utterances (American and Australian), but without words. This leaves only the rhythm and tone of the accents so Varga can determine if the infants are listening primarily to consonants and vowels; if they are, then they shouldn't show any preferences for this wordless speech. In other words, she is on the trail to what makes for perfect baby-talk in and across native languages.

Learn more about the Infant Perception Lab at www.psyc.vt.edu/infant_speech/pages/aboutus.htm.