Differential processing of consonants and vowels in the auditory modality: A cross-linguistic study

Luche, C. Delle; Poltrock, Silvana; Goslin, Jeremy; New, Boris; Floccia, Caroline; Nazzi, Thierry

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2013.12.001

Cited by 40 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…Many adult studies, using various tasks, have shown that consonants are privileged over vowels in lexical processing in French, Spanish, Italian, English, and Dutch. This was found in tasks measuring lexical access in both auditory (Cutler, Sebasti an-Gall es, Soler-Vilageliu & Van Ooijen, 2000;Delle Luche, Poltrock, Goslin, New, Floccia & Nazzi, 2014) and written modalities (Acha & Perea, 2010;New, Ara ujo & Nazzi, 2008), detection of word-forms from continuous speech (Toro, Nespor, Mehler & Bonatti, 2008), and novel word learning (Havy, Serres & Nazzi, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Call me Alix, not Elix: vowels are more important than consonants in own‐name recognition at 5 months

Bouchon

Floccia

Fux

et al. 2014

Developmental Science

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Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of consonants and vowels at the onset of lexical acquisition was assessed in French-learning 5-month-olds by testing sensitivity to minimal phonetic changes in their own name. Infants' reactions to mispronunciations revealed sensitivity to vowel but not consonant changes. Vowels were also more salient (on duration and intensity) but less distinct (on spectrally based measures) than consonants. Lastly, vowel (but not consonant) mispronunciation detection was modulated by acoustic factors, in particular spectrally based distance. These results establish that consonant changes do not affect lexical recognition at 5 months, while vowel changes do; the consonant bias observed later in development does not emerge until after 5 months through additional language exposure.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Call me Alix, not Elix: vowels are more important than consonants in own‐name recognition at 5 months

Bouchon

Floccia

Fux

et al. 2014

Developmental Science

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112

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“…The second rationale for this study related to a possible cross‐linguistic difference in the emergence of the functional difference between vowels and consonants (Nespor et al., ) during language acquisition. Although English and French adult listeners seem to display an equal “consonant bias” in auditory lexical processing (Delle Luche et al., ), this consonant bias does not seem to emerge simultaneously in the course of language acquisition. Whereas French‐learning infants display a clear‐cut consonant bias from the age of 11 months onwards (e.g., Poltrock & Nazzi, ), such a bias has not been found robustly until the age of 30 months in British English‐learning infants (Nazzi, Floccia, Moquet, & Butler, ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Infants' First Words are not Phonetically Specified: Own Name Recognition in British English‐Learning 5‐Month‐Olds

Luche

Floccia

Granjon

et al. 2016

Infancy

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By the end of their first year of life, infants’ representations of familiar words contain phonetic detail; yet little is known about the nature of these representations at the very beginning of word learning. Bouchon et al. () showed that French‐learning 5‐month‐olds could detect a vowel change in their own name and not a consonant change, but also that infants reacted to the acoustic distance between vowels. Here, we tested British English‐learning 5‐month‐olds in a similar study to examine whether the acoustic/phonological characteristics of the native language shape the nature of the acoustic/phonetic cues that infants pay attention to. In the first experiment, British English‐learning infants failed to recognize their own name compared to a mispronunciation of initial consonant (e.g., Molly versus Nolly) or vowel (e.g., April versus Ipril). Yet in the second experiment, they did so when the contrasted name was phonetically dissimilar (e.g., Sophie versus Amber). Differences in phoneme category (stops versus continuants) between the correct consonant versus the incorrect one significantly predicted infants’ own name recognition in the first experiment. Altogether, these data suggest that infants might enter into a phonetic mode of processing through different paths depending on the acoustic characteristics of their native language.

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“…Work in various linguistic subfields has shown that consonants have a privileged role in the grammar. Given that consonants tend to convey more lexical information than vowels (Nespor, Peña, & Mehler, 2003), it is not surprising that they have a stronger effect on priming and lexical decision tasks, and that vowels are in turn more easily manipulated or ignored in certain psycholinguistic tasks (Cutler, Sebastián-Gallés, Soler-Vilageliu, & Van Ooijen, 2000;Delle Luche et al, 2014;New, Araújo, & Nazzi, 2008;Toro, Nespor, Mehler, & Bonatti, 2008). However, it has also been shown that vowels, likely due to their relatively high perceptual salience (Crowder, 1971;Cutler et al, 2000), are more easily remembered in ISR tasks (Crowder, 1971;Drewnowski, 1980;Kissling, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Results from various psycholinguistic experiments further bolster the CV hypothesis, showing that it may best account for some aspects of phonological processing. Despite the high acoustic salience of vowels, words have been shown to be primed by non-words with the same consonants, but not by those with the same vowel, both in auditory (Delle Luche et al, 2014) and in visual priming experiments (New et al, 2008). While monosyllabic CVC words can be primed by non-words that share a rime (_VC) more so than they are by non-words that share an onset and nucleus (CV_), it has been shown that primes with only the same consonants as the target word (C_C) lead to even greater facilitation than rime primes in auditory lexical decision tasks (Turnbull & Peperkamp, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a result, vowels have the advantage over consonants in these tasks. If it is the case that ISR tasks do not involve accessing a phonological representation of the CV phonemes, but rather short-term memory simply of the acoustic properties of the stimulus, then these findings are not necessarily at odds with the intuition that "consonants have an overall privileged role over vowels at the phonological level" (Delle Luche et al, 2014). Rather, it could be argued that tasks requiring the accessing of abstract phonological categories make use of consonants and their ability to distinguish among lexical items, whereas tasks such as ISR instead favor vowels due to their high acoustic salience.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Templaticity Effects on Differential Processing of Consonants and Vowels

Barzilai

2019

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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The aim of this study is to investigate the role of morphophonology and written representations in speech processing. Results are presented from an immediate serial recall (ISR) study, designed to determine the relative effects of L1 morphology and orthography on the recall of consonants versus vowels. Forty-five speakers of English, Amharic, and Arabic completed an ISR experiment testing the differential recall of these two segment types. English speakers remembered sequences of syllables in which the consonant is held constant and the vowel changes (e.g., "ma mi mu …") better than sequences in which the vowel is held constant and the consonant changes (e.g., "ka ma za …"), whereas Arabic speakers remembered both types of sequences equally well, replicating findings from Kissling (2012). Crucially, Amharic speakers in this study performed similarly to Arabic speakers, remembering both sequence types with equal accuracy. Given that Amharic and Arabic share a templatic morphological system, this new result suggests that the morphophonology of a listener's L1 impacts ISR. English and Amharic share similar orthographic systems; the mean accuracies of English and Amharic speakers were significantly different, and it therefore appears that orthography of the L1 does not affect recall accuracy. The results have implications for the role of the morphophonology of a given speaker's L1 in ISR and in speech processing more generally.

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Differential processing of consonants and vowels in the auditory modality: A cross-linguistic study

Cited by 40 publications

References 75 publications

Call me Alix, not Elix: vowels are more important than consonants in own‐name recognition at 5 months

Call me Alix, not Elix: vowels are more important than consonants in own‐name recognition at 5 months

Infants' First Words are not Phonetically Specified: Own Name Recognition in British English‐Learning 5‐Month‐Olds

Templaticity Effects on Differential Processing of Consonants and Vowels

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