Adult–child differences in acoustic cue weighting are influenced by segmental context: Children are not always perceptually biased toward transitions

Mayo, Catherine; Turk, Alice

doi:10.1121/1.1738838

Cited by 53 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…About the age factor, studies from Massaro et al (1986) suggest that in consonant perception, compared with adult language learners, 6-10-year-olds are less likely to be influenced by visual information than adults. This is because "the sensitivity to certain acoustic cues increases within the first 10 years of life" (Mayo and Turk, 2004). Regarding language learners' L1, the number of visemes in their phonetic inventory(Note 1) and whether it is a tone language(Note 2) are both factors found to be influence L2 learners' employment of articulatory information in L2 speech perception.…”

Section: Factors Affecting L2 Speech Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Audiovisual Training Effects on L2 Speech Perception and Production

Liu

2016

IJELT

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This study investigated whether audiovisual perception training can improve learners' auditory perception of L2 speech sounds. 29 subjects (experimental group) who had difficulty in the perception of English /θ/-/s/ and /ð/-/z/ were recruited to attend a 9-session audiovisual perception training programme with identification tasks on the target contrasts. Their perception performance was tested before, during and at the end of the training with an AXB task. A control group was tested with the same AXB task and intervals as that of the experimental group. The results showed that the experimental group's perception accuracy improved substantially during and by the end of the training programme. The control group also showed perception improvement across the pre-test and post-test. Their degree of improvement, however, was significantly lower than that of the experimental group. These results therefore confirm the value of the audiovisual modality in L2 speech perception training.

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Section: Factors Affecting L2 Speech Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Audiovisual Training Effects on L2 Speech Perception and Production

Liu

2016

IJELT

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“…Other investigators have argued that it is not the dynamic nature of speech cues that leads to children's differentially weighting strategy, but a difference in the distinctiveness or informativeness of the cues (Sussman, 2001). A recent investigation has shown that while the distinctiveness of cues makes important contributions to the cues that children use in identifying speech, distinctiveness alone cannot account for the way that children weight cues in all situations (Mayo & Turk, 2004,2005. Whatever the variables that influence the cues that children use to identify speech sounds, the consensus is that the cues they use differ from those used by adults.…”

Section: Discovering New Detailsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Issues in human auditory development

Werner

2007

Journal of Communication Disorders

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The human auditory system is often portrayed as precocious in its development. In fact, many aspects of basic auditory processing appear to be adult-like by the middle of the first year of postnatal life. However, processes such as attention and sound source determination take much longer to develop. Immaturity of higher-level processes limits the processing of both simple and complex sounds by infants and children. Young listeners with impaired hearing may be at a particular disadvantage, in that they must make sense of sounds on the basis of a degraded representation using immature perceptual strategies.Learning outcomes-(1) Readers will be able to describe three stages of human auditory development. (2) Readers will be able to describe how experience with sound is important in auditory development. (3) Readers will be able to describe the role of attention and other higher-level processes in early audition.

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“…Although infants begin to become perceptually tuned to the characteristics of L1 already in the first year ͑Jusczyk, 1997; Kuhl et al, 1992;Werker and Tees, 1984͒, this process ultimately takes significant time to develop to adultlike perception ͑e.g., Morrongiello et al, 1984;Nittrouer et al, 1998;Nittrouer et al, 2000;Nittrouer, 2004;Parnell and Amerman, 1978͒. Specifically, children appear to apply different weightings to acoustic dimensions in perceiving L1 speech categories ͑Hazan and Barrett, 2000; Mayo and Turk, 2004;Nittrouer, 2004͒. For example, in languages in which adults weight vowel duration as a strong cue in categorization of following final stop consonants, children tend to favor the consonantinfluenced vowel-formant transitions over vowel duration ͑Nittrouer, 2004͒.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cue weighting in auditory categorization: Implications for first and second language acquisition

Holt

Lotto

2006

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

257

274

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The ability to integrate and weight information across dimensions is central to perception and is particularly important for speech categorization. The present experiments investigate cue weighting by training participants to categorize sounds drawn from a two-dimensional acoustic space defined by the center frequency ͑CF͒ and modulation frequency ͑MF͒ of frequency-modulated sine waves. These dimensions were psychophysically matched to be equally discriminable and, in the first experiment, were equally informative for accurate categorization. Nevertheless, listeners' category responses reflected a bias for use of CF. This bias remained even when the informativeness of CF was decreased by shifting distributions to create more overlap in CF. A reversal of weighting ͑MF over CF͒ was obtained when distribution variance was increased for CF. These results demonstrate that even when equally informative and discriminable, acoustic cues are not necessarily equally weighted in categorization; listeners exhibit biases when integrating multiple acoustic dimensions. Moreover, changes in weighting strategies can be affected by changes in input distribution parameters. This methodology provides potential insights into acquisition of speech sound categories, particularly second language categories. One implication is that ineffective cue weighting strategies for phonetic categories may be alleviated by manipulating variance of uninformative dimensions in training stimuli.

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Adult–child differences in acoustic cue weighting are influenced by segmental context: Children are not always perceptually biased toward transitions

Cited by 53 publications

References 34 publications

Audiovisual Training Effects on L2 Speech Perception and Production

Audiovisual Training Effects on L2 Speech Perception and Production

Issues in human auditory development

Cue weighting in auditory categorization: Implications for first and second language acquisition

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