Richard Urbano

Innateness, Experience, and Music Perception

Musical acculturation from infancy to adulthood was studied by testing the abilities of Western 6-month-olds and adults to notice mistunings in melodies based on native Western major, native Western minor, and non-native Javanese pelog scales. Results indicated that infants were similarly able to perceive native and non-native scales. Adults, however, were generally better perceivers of native than non-native scales. These findings suggest that infants are born with an equipotentiality for the perception of scales from a variety of cultures and that subsequent culturally specific experience substantially influences music perception.

Development of precursors to speech in infants exposed to two languages

The study of bilingualism has often focused on two contradictory possibilities: that the learning of two languages may produce deficits of performance in each language by comparison with performance of monolingual individuals, or on the contrary, that the learning of two languages may produce linguistic or cognitive advantages with regard to the monolingual learning experience. The work reported here addressed the possibility that the very early bilingual experience of infancy may affect the unfolding of vocal precursors to speech. The results of longitudinal research with 73 infants aged 0;4 to 1;6 in monolingual and bilingual environments provided no support for either a bilingual deficit hypothesis nor for its opposite, a bilingual advantage hypothesis. Infants reared in bilingual and monolingual environments manifested similar ages of onset for canonical babbling (production of well-formed syllables), an event known to be fundamentally related to speech development. Further, quantitative measures of vocal performance (proportion of usage of well-formed syllables and vowel-like sounds) showed additional similarities between monolingual and bilingual infants. The similarities applied to infants of middle and low socio-economic status and to infants that were born at term or prematurely. The results suggest that vocal development in the first year of life is robust with respect to conditions of rearing. The biological foundations of speech appear to be such as to resist modifications in the natural schedule of vocal development.

The role of prematurity and socioeconomic status in the onset of canonical babbling in infants

The onset of canonical babbling (implying production of well-formed syllables) is a landmark event in the development of the capacity for speech, capping a series of vocal stages of the infants first year of life. Infants who are handicapped with regard to linguistic development are, in some cases, delayed in the onset of speech-like sounds such as canonical syllables. The age of onset of canonical babbling in infants born at risk, either due to prematurity or due to low socioeconomic status (SES) has not been extensively studied. This research, based on a longitudinal investigation of babbling and other motor milestones in term and preterm infants of middle and low SES, indicates that the onset of canonical babbling is robust with regard to such risk factors. Neither preterm infants whose ages were corrected for gestational age, nor infants of low SES were delayed in the onset of canonical babbling. In fact, at corrected ages, the preterm infants appeared to begin canonical babbling earlier than their full-term counterparts. It is suggested that the greater auditory experience of the preterms in this study may account for the early appearance of canonical babbling and hand banging, both of which can be viewed as rhythmic stereotypies that may require auditory feedback for normal development. Other motor milestones studied showed neither delay nor acceleration of onset in the same infants.

Speech-like vocalizations in infancy: an evaluation of potential risk factors [*]

This work reports longitudinal evaluation of the speech-like vocal development of infants born at risk due to prematurity or low socio-economic status (SES) and infants not subject to such risk. Twenty infants were preterm (10 of low SES) and 33 were full term (16 of low SES), and all were studied from 0;4 through 1;6. The study provides the indication that at-risk infants are not generally delayed in the ability to produce well-formed speech-like sounds as indicated in tape-recorded vocal samples. At the same time, premature infants show a tendency to produce well-formed syllables less consistently than full terms after the point at which parents and laboratory personnel note the onset of the canonical babbling stage (the point after which well-formed syllables are well established in the infant vocal repertoires). Further, even though low SES infants produce well-formed speech-like structures on schedule, they show a reliably lower tendency to vocalize in general, as reflected by fewer utterances per minute in recorded samples.

The Identification of Giftedness: A Comparison of White, Hispanic and Black Families

A survey was sent to White, Hispanic and Black parents of children in the gifted and talented program of a large urban school district. The results indicated that there were few differences among the three parent groups in either the characteristics that had indicated to them that their child might be gifted, or in the attributes which they believed were current descriptors of their gifted child. Large group differences were present, however, between the White sample and the two minority group samples in the percentage of families who requested an evaluation of their child for possible placement in the gifted and talented program. Fewer of the minority parents made such a request. This factor could contribute to the underrepresentation of minority students in gifted programs.

Identifying Cognitively Gifted Ethnic Minority Children

Four hundred kindergarten children in regular education and 31 kindergarten children identified as gifted were presented a cognitive battery consisting of nine different tasks. Five measures representing the three open-ended tasks were associated with both a significant group difference and the presence of high performing outliers from the regular education sample. When frequency distributions for the two groups were computed based on a total score summed over the five measures, seven of the eight regular education students with the highest score, the upper 2%, were either Black/NonHispanic or White/Hispanic. The upper 2% of the regular education sample performed at a level above 81% of the gifted sample, The data suggest that using a childs performance on a cognitive battery may prove to be effective for identifying gifted minority children who have not previously been identified as having superior cognitive abilities.

Extreme poverty and the development of precursors to the speech capacity

The study of infant vocal development has suggested that babbling is an important precursor of the speech capacity. In addition, research has shown that the babbling of infants is biologically robust - it develops normally in infants from widely varying environments of language and socio-economic status. Babbling development is so robust that even premature birth does not appear to slow its course in healthy infants.

Optimization of automated hearing test algorithms: Simulations using an infant response model

Computer simulation was used to evaluate several parameters of an automated hearing test algorithm in an attempt to optimize the algorithm for accuracy and efficiency. An infant response model was developed to guide the simulations. Test parameters of interest were starting intensity and stopping rule and their interaction with a measure that is thought to emulate infant reliability, probability of task orientation. Results indicated that stopping rule, within the ranges investigated, had little effect on accuracy but had major impact on efficiency. Starting intensity interacted with the hearing status of pseudosubjects in influencing accuracy. Accuracy was most influenced by probability of task orientation. The simulated test data are compared to data from infants and young children in the accompanying article so that the response model can be evaluated.

Optimization of automated hearing test algorithms: a comparison of data from simulations and young children.

A five-up, five-down automated staircase procedure was used to explore the effects of variable starting and stopping rules as they interact with infant behavior in influencing the accuracy and efficiency of infant auditory threshold testing. Results from 146 infants were compared to results from computer simulations (see accompanying article) in order to evaluate an infant response model used in the simulations. Results indicate that the automated procedure successfully discriminated between infants with normal versus abnormal tympanograms. In addition, the model accurately predicted infant results in terms of the effects of starting and stopping rules. The model was less useful in predicting the relationship between minimum response levels and false positive rates.

New Screening Tests to Identify Young Children at Risk for Mild Learning Problems

Each of 34 prekindergarten and 39 kindergarten children with mild learning problems, those with mild mental retardation or learning disabilities, was matched with a child without learning problems on the basis of age, gender, and race/ethnicity. All children were presented the same cognitive screening test, which consisted of eight tasks. For the prekindergarten group, 91% of the children with learning problems and 91% of those without problems were accurately classified using a subset of five tasks. Two of these were identification tasks, where the children had only to point to choices provided; the other three tasks required children to generate verbal responses. For the kindergarten sample, the highest level of classification accuracy achieved for the children with mild learning problems was 87% and for the children without learning problems, 77%. These levels were also based on a subset of five tasks, but this subset consisted of four identification tasks and one generating task. Levels of classification accuracy were higher for the children classified as having mild mental retardation than for the group classified as having learning disabilities. Females had slightly higher scores than males on the kindergarten test, and the White/non-Hispanic group had higher scores than the other ethnic/racial groups on the prekindergarten test.