Associate Professor; VT SACS Coordinator

Faculty Psychology Department

Faculty Developmental and Biological Psychology

Faculty/Consultant Child Study Center

panneton@vt.edu

Psychology
321 Williams Hall
(540) 231-5938

SACS
103 Sandy Hall
(540) 231-9770

Office Hours:
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Other times by appointment

Read My Curriculum Vita (PDF)

In the Infant Perception Lab, we study infants' attention to events that have relevance for their early development, especially language learning, indexed by both behavioral and psychophysiological (HR) measures. We test infants of all ages, in tasks that are designed to be interesting for them and for us. Here are some of our current projects:

Do infants integrate information in both the face and the voice of an adult female speaker?
Does the emotion of the speaker affect infants' abilities to pay attention to words?
How do infants pay attention to speech in the presence of background noise?
Does the extent of an infant's attention to faces and voices predict their subsequent level of language skill at a later age?
When infants are viewing videos of female speakers (including their own mothers), where precisely are they looking?

We welcome your inquiries into our studies and available research positions in the laboratory. Please contact Dr. Panneton for more information.

Background

1978-1985 Ph.D. Developmental Psychology, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC

Research/Professional Interests

perceptual development during infancy; infant speech perception; development of attention during infancy; multimodal integration in infancy

Recent Courses Taught

6944 - Prenatal Development
6944 - Speech Perception in Infancy and Early Childhood
4364 - Genes, Mind, and Culture
4034 - Advanced Developmental Psychology: Language Development

Publications

Panneton, R., McIlreavy, M., & Bhullar, N. (2008). Preverbal development and speech perception during infancy.In M. M. Haith and J. Benson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development. : Elsevier.

Panneton, R., Kitamura, C., Mattock, K., & Burnham, D. (2006). Slow speech enhances younger but not older infants' perception of vocal emotion. Research in Human Development, Special Issue: The ecology of emotion in parenting relationships, 7-19.

McCartney, J., & Panneton, R. (2005). Four-month-olds’ discrimination of voice changes in multimodal displays as a function of discrimination protocol. Infancy, 7, 163-182.

Ward, C.D., & Cooper, R. P. (1999). A lack of evidence in four-month-old human infants for paternal voice preference. Developmental Psychobiology, 35, 29-60.

Cooper, R. P. (1997). An ecological approach to infants' perception of intonation contours as meaningful aspects of speech.. In C. Dent-Read & P. Zukow-Goldring (Eds.), Evolving explanations of development: Ecological approaches to organism-environment systems (pp. 55-85). Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association.

Cooper, R. P., Abraham, J., Berman, S., & Staska, M. (1997). The development of infant preference for motherese.. Infant Behavior and Development, 20, 477-488.