How is an infant's perception influenced by her or his culture and cultural traditions? Give evidence to support your examples

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Although people in different cultures rarely differ in such basic perceptual capabilities as the ability to discriminate forms, patterns, and degrees of brightness or loudness (Berry et al., 1992), culture can have some subtle but important effects on perception.
For example, each of us begins life biologically prepared to acquire any language that humans speak. But as we are exposed to a particular language, we become especially sensitive to the sound patterns that are important to that language (that is, to its distinctive features) and less sensitive to auditory distinctions our language deems irrelevant. All infants easily discriminate the consonants r and l (Eimas, 1975a). So can you if your native language is English, French, Spanish, or German. However, Chinese and Japanese make no distinction between r and l, and adult native speakers of these languages cannot make this auditory discrimination as well as infants can (Miyawaki et al., 1975).
Music is another cultural tool that influences our auditory perception. Michael Lynch and his associates (1990) had six-month-old infants and American adults listen to melodies in either the Western major/minor scale or the Javanese pelog scale, which sounds a bit strange to Western adults. Inserted within the melodies was an occasional "mistuned" note that violated the musical scale. Remarkably, six-month-old infants often detected these mistuned notes, regardless of whether they violated a Western or a Javanese melody. Apparently babies are born with the potential to perceive "musicality" and to discriminate "good" music from "bad" music in a variety of musical scales. American adults were much less sensitive to bad notes in the unfamiliar Javanese musical system than to mistuned notes in their native Western scale, suggesting that their years of experience with the Western musical system had shaped their perceptions of music.
These findings illustrate two general principles of development that are very important. First, the growth of perceptual abilities, like so many other aspects of development, is not simply a matter of adding new skills; it is also a matter of losing unnecessary ones. Second, our culture largely determines which sensory inputs are "distinctive" and how they should be interpreted. We learn not to hear certain phonemes if they are not distinctive to the language we speak. So the way we perceive the world depends not only on the detection of the objective aspects in our sensory inputs (perceptual learning) but also on cultural learning experiences that provide a framework for interpreting these inputs.