 Dr. Michael H. Goldstein is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D in developmental psychology and animal behavior from Indiana University. His research focuses on the developmental processes by which knowledge is acquired from the social environment. He uses a comparative approach, studying vocal learning and development in young songbirds and humans. To investigate the processes by which infant development is constructed from interactions with caregivers, Goldstein takes a micro-analytic approach to social learning. He observes and manipulates parent-offspring interactions at small time scales to understand mechanisms of developmental change. His primary research goal is to identify parameters of social interaction that are crucial for infant learning to better understand causal forces of development. This general goal has given rise to two research programs. The first program investigates the development of babbling, specifying the relative contributions of infant and caregiver behavior in the generation of new vocal forms, including speech, phonology, and words. The second program examines the role of experience in adults’ responses to prelinguistic vocalizations. By studying social interaction and learning as it occurs in moment-to-moment interactions, Goldstein intends to connect our knowledge of social influences on developmental outcomes with specific processes of learning. |
| Abstract: The early vocalizations of songbirds and human infants, though immature in form, are similar in function. Producing these early sounds is crucial for the later development of speech and song. The process of vocal development has a strong social component: the responses of conspecifics create social feedback for early sounds that guides the young towards mature vocalizations. I will present experiments demonstrating how immature sounds of young birds and babies regulate and are regulated by interactions with conspecifics. These studies view the infant as taking an active role in its own development and introduce new paradigms for understanding the origins of communicative skills. In cowbirds, Molothrus ater, immature vocalizations of young males elicit reactions from adult females (who do not sing), and this feedback facilitates the development of more advanced forms of song. In humans, playback experiments show that mothers use prelinguistic vocal cues to guide their responses to infants. Vocal learning studies reveal that prelinguistic infants use social feedback from caregivers to build more developmentally advanced forms of vocalizations. Feedback from conspecifics thus provides reliable cues about the consequences of vocalizing. These cues serve to facilitate infants acquisition of the basic building blocks of speech and song. |