The influence of prenatal experience on differential responsiveness to vocal expressions of emotion in newborns.
Item
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Title
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The influence of prenatal experience on differential responsiveness to vocal expressions of emotion in newborns.
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Identifier
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AAI9630490
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identifier
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9630490
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Creator
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Mastropieri, Diane Patricia.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Gerald Turkewitz
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Developmental | Psychology, Cognitive | Health Sciences, Human Development
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Abstract
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This study investigated newborn differentiation of vocal expressions of emotion and the relevance of prenatal experience to such differentiation.;Differentiation of emotion was tested by examining the responses of newborn infants (12-72 hours after birth) to the presentation of four vocal expressions (i.e., happy, sad, angry, and neutral). Differential responding was observed, as indicated by a significant increase in eye opening in response to the presentation of happy speech patterns as compared to eye openings in response to the other vocal expressions.;To examine the relevance of prenatal experience in influencing this ability, responding in infants with different prenatal acoustic experiences (i.e., prenatal exposure to either English and Spanish maternal speech) were compared. Differential responding was observed only in those infants listening to emotional speech in the language which they had experienced prenatally. Infants born to Spanish speaking mothers showed an increase in eye opening in response to the presentation of the happy vocal expressions in Spanish, similar to that observed in the English infants listening to English vocal expressions. In contrast, no significant evidence of differential responding was found in the two groups of infants listening to the same vocal expressions when they were presented in an unfamiliar language (i.e., Spanish infants listening to English expressions and English infants listening to Spanish expressions).;These results indicate that the ability to differentiate emotion exists earlier in development than previously anticipated. More importantly, the results suggest that the origin of differential responsiveness to emotional speech is based upon learning that occurs during the fetal period. A potential mechanism--temporal contiguity between the prosodic acoustic characteristics of emotional speech and stimuli created by the associated maternal physiologic changes--is proposed to account for this influence of prenatal experience on newborn behavior. That newborns were capable of differentiating among the different sounds experienced prenatally, while infants without prior experience could not, suggests that the presence of other stimuli in the fetal environment (i.e., stimuli created by maternal physiological responses concomitant on emotion) serve to make the distinctive emotional speech patterns distinguishable.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
