Dr. Rochelle Newman Meeting Minutes

2/12/20

Dr. Rochelle Newman

• Runs the Language Development and Perception Laboratory and the Canine Perception Laboratory on campus
• Most of her work has been in infants and children and how they listen in noise, if someone is speaking with an unfamiliar accent, or some other barrier to typical comprehension
• Dogs are one of the only species that have developed and adapted to understand human speech
• Dogs have a relatively similar auditory range to humans, they’re attentive to us, they can follow our cues (eye gaze, gestures, etc)
• Working on comparing infants and dogs and how they can listen in noise
• Adults do really well when there is only one person talking, but poorly when there are multiple talkers, while infants are the exact opposite
  • There are different theories as to why this is the case: maybe it’s about hearing capabilities, exposure to words, etc
  • If we look at dogs, we might be able to figure out why infants have trouble listen to single talkers
• As adults, we realize that consonants have a bigger role in meaning than vowels do
  • Ex: “dunkey” we say that was supposed to be “donkey” and not “monkey”
• When infants come out of the womb, they already prefer their native language because it is heard even in utero
• Languages that differ in prosody seem more different to infants than languages that differ in phonemes, because rhythm/prosody is what you can hear in utero
• Dogs are the same way! Dogs listen longer to unfamiliar languages, especially those that vary in prosody, because they are new and interesting
• They use the same experimental procedure as they do for infants, which is the head-turn preference paradigm
• If you are interested in working in the lab, you always start off with infants and then can go on to dogs in the following semesters if you are interested in it