Word: meltzoff
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Maratos' thesis was never published, so the credit for the discovery went mainly to two young psychologists who now teach at the University of Washington, Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore. Their study, published in 1977, showed that babies only twelve days old could imitate an adult sticking out a tongue. Meltzoff and Moore demonstrated that if a pacifier in the baby's mouth prevented the infant from imitating the adult, it would remember what it wanted to do until the pacifier was removed; then the baby would promptly stick out its tongue...
That first study by Meltzoff and Moore aroused considerable skepticism, so they repeated and elaborated it in 1981, eliminating all uncertainties and using still younger children. "We had one baby 42 minutes old, with blood still on its hair," recalls Meltzoff. "We washed it and tested it. We found that even newborns could imitate adults...
...Meltzoff pursued his exploration of intermodal perception by a different test of vision and touch. He gave ordinary pacifiers to a group of month-old babies and pacifiers with bumps on them to another group. He then had the babies look at models of the two kinds of nipples. The result, says Meltzoff, was that "they would look at the ones they had felt." Now, with Speech Professor Patricia Kuhl, he has extended those tests to language. The researchers showed infants two films of faces saying "ahh" and "eee," then placed between the two pictures a loudspeaker that could make...