Bahrick L E, Netto D, Hernandez-Reif M
Department of Psychology, Florida International University, Miami 33199, USA.
Child Dev. 1998 Oct;69(5):1263-75.
This research investigated the ability of 4- and 7-month-old infants to match unfamiliar, dynamic faces and voices on the basis of age or maturity. In Experiment 1, infants received videotaped trials of an adult and a child of the same gender, side by side, speaking a nursery rhyme in synchrony with one another. The voice to one and then the other face was played in synchrony with the movements of both faces in a random order across 12 trials. On one block of 6 trials a man and a boy were presented, and on the other block a woman and a girl. Results indicated significant matching of the faces and voices at both ages, and the infant's prior experience with children appeared to facilitate matching at 7 months. Further, a visual preference for the children's faces was found. Experiment 2 assessed matching to the same events by 7-month-olds, only with the faces inverted. Results indicated no evidence of matching; however, the visual preference for the children's faces was replicated. Together, the findings suggest that infants are able to detect invariant intermodal relations specifying the age or maturity of a person's face and voice. This matching was most likely based on information that was degraded by inverting the faces, including invariant relations between the sound of the voice and configurational aspects of the face, or between temporal aspects of the voice and the relative motion of facial features.
本研究调查了4个月和7个月大的婴儿根据年龄或成熟度来匹配陌生、动态的面孔和声音的能力。在实验1中，婴儿观看了一段录像，录像中一名成人和一名同性别的儿童并排同步说着一首童谣。在12次试验中，随机地将与两张面孔动作同步的一个声音先播放给其中一张面孔，然后再播放给另一张面孔。在一组6次试验中呈现一名男性和一名男孩，在另一组试验中呈现一名女性和一名女孩。结果表明，两个年龄段的婴儿都能显著地将面孔和声音匹配起来，而且婴儿之前与儿童的接触经历似乎有助于7个月大的婴儿进行匹配。此外，还发现婴儿对面孔有视觉偏好。实验2评估了7个月大的婴儿对相同事件的匹配情况，只是面孔是倒置的。结果表明没有匹配的迹象；然而，对面孔的视觉偏好再次得到了验证。总之，研究结果表明，婴儿能够检测到指定人脸年龄或成熟度的不变的跨模态关系。这种匹配很可能是基于因面孔倒置而退化的信息，包括声音与面孔结构特征之间的不变关系，或者声音的时间特征与面部特征的相对运动之间的不变关系。
