Infants′ Sensitivity to the Sound Patterns of Native Language Words

Jusczyk, Peter W.; Friederici, Angela D.; Wessels, Jeanine; Svenkerud, Vigdis Y.; Jusczyk, Ann Marie

doi:10.1006/jmla.1993.1022

Cited by 597 publications

(359 citation statements)

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“…Although we cannot presently rule out the possibility of learning from prenatal perceptual experience (i.e., from Italian-the language spoken by the infants' mothers), this possibility is exceedingly unlikely given the strong intrauterine attenuation of sound frequencies above 300 Hz (35, 36)-conditions that render consonant discrimination improbable. Moreover, the proposal that infants can learn the syllable structure of their language in utero fails to explain the evidence for the acquisition of the phonotactic patterns of their language only by the end of the first year of life, and not earlier (37,38).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language universals at birth

Gómez

Berent

Benavides-Varela

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The evolution of human languages is driven both by primitive biases present in the human sensorimotor systems and by cultural transmission among speakers. However, whether the design of the language faculty is further shaped by linguistic biological biases remains controversial. To address this question, we used near-infrared spectroscopy to examine whether the brain activity of neonates is sensitive to a putatively universal phonological constraint. Across languages, syllables like blif are preferred to both lbif and bdif. Newborn infants (2-5 d old) listening to these three types of syllables displayed distinct hemodynamic responses in temporal-perisylvian areas of their left hemisphere. Moreover, the oxyhemoglobin concentration changes elicited by a syllable type mirrored both the degree of its preference across languages and behavioral linguistic preferences documented experimentally in adulthood. These findings suggest that humans possess early, experience-independent, linguistic biases concerning syllable structure that shape language perception and acquisition.human newborns | speech perception | NIRS | sonority | phonology

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language universals at birth

Gómez

Berent

Benavides-Varela

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Similarly, at 6 months, English-learners are as content to listen to words consisting of sequences of phonetic segments which are impermissible within words of the native language as to words containing permissible sequences. However, by 9 months, not only do English-learners favor the words with the permissible sequences (Jusczyk, Friederici, Wessels, Svenkerud, & Jusczyk, 1993b), but they also favor those with frequently occurring phonotactic patterns over those with less frequent (but still permissible) patterns (Jusczyk, Luce, & Charles-Luce, 1994). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Lexical viability constraints on speech segmentation by infants

Johnson

Jusczyk

Cutler

et al. 2003

Cognitive Psychology

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The Possible Word Constraint limits the number of lexical candidates considered in speech recognition by stipulating that input should be parsed into a string of lexically viable chunks. For instance, an isolated single consonant is not a feasible word candidate. Any segmentation containing such a chunk is disfavored. Five experiments using the head-turn preference procedure investigated whether, like adults, 12-month-olds observe this constraint in word recognition. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with target words (e.g., rush), then tested on lists of non-

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“…This hypothesis was based on the previous observation of links existing between infants' preferences for specific sound sequences and their frequencies in the language. Indeed, prior studies have shown that by 9 months of age, infants have become sensitive to the phonotactic properties of their native language, preferring legal over illegal sequences (Jusczyk, Friederici, Wessels, Svenkerud, & Jusczyk, 1993a;Friederici & Wessels, 1993;Sebastián-Gallés & Bosch, 2002), and also more frequent over less frequent phonotactically legal sequences (Jusczyk, Luce, & Charles-Luce, 1994). With regard to the LC bias, it has been shown that LC sequences are significantly more frequent than CL sequences in the lexicons of 17 different languages (MacNeilage et al, 1999;Vallée et al, 2001).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: A crosslinguistic comparison

et al. 2014

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a b s t r a c tPrevious studies have described the existence of a phonotactic bias called the Labial-Coronal (LC) bias, corresponding to a tendency to produce more words beginning with a labial consonant followed by a coronal consonant (i.e. ''bat'') than the opposite CL pattern (i.e. ''tap''). This bias has initially been interpreted in terms of articulatory constraints of the human speech production system. However, more recently, it has been suggested that this presumably language-general LC bias in production might be accompanied by LC and CL biases in perception, acquired in infancy on the basis of the properties of the linguistic input. The present study investigates the origins of these perceptual biases, testing infants learning Japanese, a language that has been claimed to possess more CL than LC sequences, and comparing them with infants learning French, a language showing a clear LC bias in its lexicon. First, a corpus analysis of Japanese IDS and ADS revealed the existence of an overall LC bias, except for plosive sequences in ADS, which show a CL bias across counts. Second, speech preference experiments showed a perceptual preference for CL over LC plosive sequences (all recorded by a Japanese speaker) in 13-but not in 7-and 10-month-old Japanese-learning infants (Experiment 1), while revealing the emergence of an LC preference between 7 and 10 months in French-learning infants, using the exact same stimuli. These crosslinguistic behavioral differences, obtained with the same stimuli, thus reflect differences in processing in two populations of infants, which can be linked to differences in the properties of the lexicons of their respective native languages. These findings establish that the emergence of a CL/LC bias is related to exposure to a linguistic input.

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Infants′ Sensitivity to the Sound Patterns of Native Language Words

Cited by 597 publications

References 0 publications

Language universals at birth

Language universals at birth

Lexical viability constraints on speech segmentation by infants

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: A crosslinguistic comparison

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