According to a new study, toddlers do not respond to their own voice the same way that adults have been found to do.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, suggests that young children must have some other strategy to control their speech production.
Ewen MacDonald of the Technical University of Denmark said in an example that as violinists play music, they will listen to the notes to ensure they are in tune. He said if their instrument is not in tune, the musician will adjust the position of their fingers to bring the notes back in tune.
“When we speak, we do something very similar. We subconsciously listen to vowel and consonant sounds in our speech to ensure we are producing them correctly,” McDonald said in a press release. “If the acoustics of our speech are slightly different from what we intended, then, like the violinists, we will adjust the way we speak to correct for these slight errors.”
The authors had adults, four-year-olds, and two-year-olds say the word “bed” repeatedly while hearing a recording of themselves saying “bad” to trick their brain into thinking they were making the wrong sound.
The adults and four-year-olds began trying to compensate by changing the vowel, saying something more like the word “bid”. However, the two-year-olds continued pronouncing “bed” correctly.
In our study, we found that four-year-olds monitor their own speech in the same way as adults. Surprisingly, two-year-olds do not,” McDonald said in the press release.
He said the results suggest a need to reconsider assumptions about how children make use of auditory feedback.
Two-year-olds may depend on their parents or other people to monitor their speech instead of relying on their own voice. MacDonald said that caregivers often do repeat or reflect back to young children what they have heard them say.
The team will now be exploring potential applications for understanding or addressing delayed and abnormal early speech development.
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