Linguistic Experience Alters Phonetic Perception in Infants by 6 Months of Age

Kuhl, Patricia K.; Williams, Karen; Lacerda, Francisco; Stevens, Kenneth N.; Lindblom, Björn

doi:10.1126/science.1736364

Cited by 1,653 publications

(1,095 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Our data more generally indicate that once children acquire the semantic system of their own language, their nonlinguistic sensitivity to those distinctions not made in their language diminishes over time. There appear to be similarities between the loss in sensitivity to tight versus loose fitting aspects of containment by English speakers shown in Experiment 2 and the loss of phonetic contrasts that are not phonemic in oneÕs native tongue (Kuhl, Williams, Lacerda, Stevens, & Lindblom, 1992;Werker & Lalonde, 1988). But there are many differences between the perceptual tuning of the sounds of oneÕs language and the conceptual tuning of semantic categories that result from what the language emphasizes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Understanding spatial relations: Flexible infants, lexical adults

McDonough

Choi

Mandler

2003

Cognitive Psychology

196

158

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Concepts of containment, support, and degree of fit were investigated using nonverbal, preferential-looking tasks with 9-to 14-month-old infants and adults who were fluent in either English or Korean. Two contrasts were tested: tight containment vs. loose support (grammaticized as ÔinÕ and ÔonÕ in English by spatial prepositions and ÔkkitaÕ and ÔnohtaÕ in Korean by spatial verbs) and tight containment vs. loose containment (both grammaticized as ÔinÕ in English but separately as ÔkkitaÕ and ÔnehtaÕ in Korean). Infants categorized both contrasts, suggesting conceptual readiness for learning such spatial semantics in either language. English-speaking adults categorized tight containment vs. loose support, but not tight vs. loose containment. However, Korean-speaking adults were successful at this latter contrast, which is lexicalized in their language. The adult data suggest that some spatial relations that are salient during the preverbal stage become less salient if language does not systematically encode them.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Understanding spatial relations: Flexible infants, lexical adults

McDonough

Choi

Mandler

2003

Cognitive Psychology

196

158

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“…In early childhood, native language environment starts to shape the perception of speech sounds (Kuhl et al, 1992;Kuhl et al, 2006;Ortiz-Mantilla et al, 2013), and improvements in speech perception accuracy are still seen during the first three grades . Further, longitudinal studies have found that the differences in speech perception ability between children with and without dyslexia vary depending on age , and suggestions have been made of different developmental trajectory of the perceptual abilities of children with language related difficulties Wright and Zecker, 2004).…”

Section: Atypical Quantity Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancement of brain event-related potentials to speech sounds is associated with compensated reading skills in dyslexic children with familial risk for dyslexia

Lohvansuu

Hämäläinen

Tanskanen

et al. 2014

International Journal of Psychophysiology

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“…For example, in English, there is a difference in voice onset time between the two instances of /p/ in 'perceptual', but an English child will learn to ignore this difference, whereas she will learn not to ignore the meaningful difference between the voice onset times in the initial sounds in 'pear' and 'bear'. Despite the apparent difficulty of this learning task, infants have already learned their native phonetic contrasts before their first birthday (vowels by six months: Kuhl, Williams, Lacerda, Stevens, & Lindblom, 1992; consonants by ten months: Werker & Tees, 1984). It remains unclear, however, how infants start building such optimally restricted categories, that is, how they learn to focus on only those contrasts that are relevant for their native language (Werker & Tees, 1984).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Schure

Junge

Boersma

2016

Infant Behavior and Development

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Semantics guide infants' vowel learning: computational and experimental evidenceter Schure, S.M.M.; Junge, C.M.M.; Boersma, P.P.G. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. a b s t r a c tIn their first year, infants' perceptual abilities zoom in on only those speech sound contrasts that are relevant for their language. Infants' lexicons do not yet contain sufficient minimal pairs to explain this phonetic categorization process. Therefore, researchers suggested a bottom-up learning mechanism: infants create categories aligned with the frequency distributions of sounds in their input. Recent evidence shows that this bottom-up mechanism may be complemented by the semantic context in which speech sounds occur, such as simultaneously present objects. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether discrimination of a non-native vowel contrast improves when sounds from the contrast were paired consistently or randomly with two distinct visually presented objects, while the distribution of speech tokens suggested a single broad category. This was assessed in two ways: computationally, namely in a neural network simulation, and experimentally, namely in a group of 8-month-old infants. The neural network, trained with a large set of sound-meaning pairs, revealed that two categories emerge only if sounds are consistently paired with objects. A group of 49 real 8-month-old infants did not immediately show sensitivity to the pairing condition; a later test at 18 months with some of the same infants, however, showed that this sensitivity at 8 months interacted with their vocabulary size at 18 months. This interaction can be explained by the idea that infants with larger future vocabularies are more positively influenced by consistent training (and/or more negatively influenced by inconsistent training) than infants with smaller future vocabularies. This suggests that consistent pairing with distinct visual objects can help infants to discriminate speech sounds even when the auditory information does not signal a distinction. Together our results give computational as well as experimental support for the idea that semantic context plays a role in disambiguating phonetic auditory input.

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Linguistic Experience Alters Phonetic Perception in Infants by 6 Months of Age

Cited by 1,653 publications

References 13 publications

Understanding spatial relations: Flexible infants, lexical adults

Understanding spatial relations: Flexible infants, lexical adults

Enhancement of brain event-related potentials to speech sounds is associated with compensated reading skills in dyslexic children with familial risk for dyslexia

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

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