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# The Cocktail Party Effect in Infants

## Details

**Authors** Newman and Jusczyk

**Year** 1996

**Publisher** Perception & Psychophysics

**Discipline** Human Development

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03207548) 
10.3758/BF03207548

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

Do infants experience the "cocktail party effect?"

### What they found (results)

Infants indicated that they listened longer to the recordings with the familiarized words, demonstrating that they do experience the "cocktail party effect."

## Commentary

### In short

Infants are able to make auditory distinctions.

### In more detail

As Quinn et al shows, young infants visually distinguish among objects with some skill. Studies on aural distinctions made by infants also explore another sensory mode of distinguishing sounds. Newman and Jusczyk (1996) studied the brain’s ability to separate one sound (i.e., your name at a cocktail party) from many competing background sounds (known as the “cocktail party effect.” This phenomena has been studied in adults, but their studies showed that infants as young as 7.5 months old separate particular sounds from competing sounds. Their first three experiments were designed to test if infants at or around the age of 7.5 months were able to attend to a target voice that was either 10 dB, 5 dB, or 0 dB more intense than a competing background voice. The researchers hypothesized that if infants were able to separate competing layers of speech, they would listen longer to “fluent speech passages” that contain words they heard in the familiarization trial.

For the first experiment, 24 infants at ~7.5 months of age were tested. They went through a familiarization trial, where they were familiarized with their target words. They were then tested with four, 6-sentence passages (known in text as “Cup”, “Dog”, “Feet”, and “Bike”) that were read and recorded by a woman speaking in a “lively” tone. The familiarized target words were dispersed throughout the passages, and were not necessarily emphasized in the passage. For the distractor recording, a non-lively male voice was used, and when the two recordings were played, the distractor passage was set at 10 dB lower than the target recording. Half of the infants were assigned to the “Cup and Dog” familiarization trials, while the other half were assigned to the “Feet and Bike” familiarization trials. The two recordings were played while the infant was looking at a blinking red light, and the recording stopped when the infant looked away for two consecutive seconds (to indicate that they were no longer listening). The results showed that 21 out of 24 infants listened longer to the passages containing familiar words. The infants listened to the familiar passages for an average of 7.71 seconds, and the unfamiliar ones for an average of 6.21 seconds. “These results suggest that infants are capable of separating different streams of speech and are capable of listening selectively.”

For the second experiment the only change in the method was that the distractor passage was reduced to 5 dB lower than the target passage. All other experimental conditions were the same, including the sample of 24 infants aged ~7.5 months. In this second experiment 18 of 24 infants listened longer to the passages

**Patterns it shows** D

**How to cite this** Newman and Jusczyk (1996). The Cocktail Party Effect in Infants. Perception & Psychophysics.