Pitch characteristics of infant-directed speech affect infants’ ability to discriminate vowels

Trainor, Laurel J.; Desjardins, Renée

doi:10.3758/bf03196290

Cited by 166 publications

(144 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…The current results suggest that there is either a causal link between the ability of frequency discrimination and grammatical rule learning or a parallel development in both domains. A direct causal link could operate via the role frequency information plays in phoneme discrimination (15,30), which is a precondition for detecting long-range dependencies between phonemes. Alternatively, both pitch perception and rule Step-down analyses are given after the superordinate analysis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The importance of frequency information for language comprehension becomes evident when the frequency spectrum is degraded and leads to severe problems in speech recognition (14). On the other hand, an enhanced frequency spectrum may boost language learning, as it was shown to be beneficial for the discrimination of vowel categories by infants at about 6 mo of age (15).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Auditory perception at the root of language learning

Mueller

Friederici

Männel

2012

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

128

182

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Learning a spoken language presupposes efficient auditory functions. In the present event-related potential study, we tested whether and how basic auditory processes are related to online learning of a linguistic rule in infants and adults. Participants listened to frequent standard stimuli, which were interspersed with infrequent pitch deviants and rule deviants, violating a nonadjacent dependency between two syllables. Only infants who showed the more mature mismatch response for the pitch deviants (i.e., a negativity) showed a mismatch response to the rule deviants. Concordantly, the small group of adults who showed evidence of rule learning showed larger mismatch effects for pitch processing. We conclude that the ability to extract linguistic rules develops in early infancy and is tightly linked to functional aspects of basic auditory mechanisms.language acquisition | AXB rules | pitch perception | mismatch negativity H uman language is based on an acoustically transmitted signal. The successful language learner needs to decode the linguistic content of a complex auditory signal into its component units and their relation to each other, thus deriving words and rules. Although sufficient speech input is widely considered to be crucial for language learning, the perceptual abilities that form the gateway to spoken language have long been neglected in first and second language acquisition research. Basic auditory perception may, however, be an important determinant of language learning processes across the range of normal and abnormal development.There is empirical evidence supporting the idea that early auditory abilities impact on later outcomes of language development in normal infants and populations with language-related disorders (1-3). Furthermore, auditory brainstem responses in language-impaired children suggest that low-level auditory processes contribute to the pathogenesis of language disorders (4). In adults, individual differences in perceptual abilities correlate with language-processing abilities in their native and a second language (5, 6). The findings suggest a potential causal relationship between basic auditory processing ability and the efficiency of language learning in infancy and adulthood.Although infants do not produce complex language in their first year of life, they show remarkable abilities to extract regular patterns from speech input early on. Eight-month-old infants, and even newborns, have been shown to be sensitive to transitional probabilities between syllables defining word-like units (7,8). Syllable repetitions can be detected from birth (9) and dependencies between nonadjacent units of speech can be detected as early as 4 mo of age (10). Learners seem to be able to exploit various distributional and acoustic cues to detect words and rules in speech input. Infants, for example, take advantage of prosodic cues for detecting possible words in the linguistic input (11). Similarly, prosodic cues seem to assist adults' extraction of grammatical patterns from speech input (12, 1...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory perception at the root of language learning

Mueller

Friederici

Männel

2012

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

128

182

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…For instance, research on individual variation in intelligibility shows that clear speakers tend to expand their vowel spaces as well as to produce more extensive pitch ranges (Bradlow et al, 2003;Ferguson and Kewley-Port, 2007;Picheny et al, 1985;Smiljianic and Bradlow, 2005). This irrelevant pitch dimension greatly affects infants' performance: More extensive pitch ranges attract infants' attention (Fernald and Kuhl, 1987), as well as directly facilitate vowel discrimination (Trainor and Desjardins, 2002) and processing of non-linguistic material (Kaplan et al, 1995b(Kaplan et al, , 1996. Furthermore, naturally occurring individual differences in caregivers' prosody have an important effect on infants' learning abilities (Kaplan et al, 2002).…”

Section: Choice Of Categorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Fine-grained variation in caregivers’ /s/ predicts their infants’ /s/ category

Cristià

2011

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Within the debate on the mechanisms underlying infants' perceptual acquisition, one hypothesis proposes that infants' perception is directly affected by the acoustic implementation of sound categories in the speech they hear. In consonance with this view, the present study shows that individual variation in fine-grained, subphonemic aspects of the acoustic realization of /s/ in caregivers' speech predicts infants' discrimination of this sound from the highly similar /$/, suggesting that learning based on acoustic cue distributions may indeed drive natural phonological acquisition.

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“…vowels that exhibit an unstable tonal "glide" before the stable tonal phase begins. Tonal glides in vowels are reported to be very salient for infant listeners (Trainor & Desjardins, 2002). The beginning of the stable tonal phase after such a glide shows some specificities in the German material: in almost 85% of the syllables with short/lax vowels and following sonorant consonants the stable tonal phase was located in the consonant, whereas in syllables with long/tense vowels the stable tonal phase was never located in consonantal material.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal Variability and Stability in Infant-Directed Sung Speech: Evidence for Language-specific Patterns

Falk

2011

Lang Speech

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In this paper, sung speech is used as a methodological tool to explore temporal variability in the timing of word-internal consonants and vowels. It is hypothesized that temporal variability/stability becomes clearer under the varying rhythmical conditions induced by song. This is explored crosslinguistically in German -a language that exhibits a potential vocalic quantity distinction -and the non-quantity languages French and Russian. Songs by non-professional singers, i.e. parents that sang to their infants aged 2 to 13 months in a non-laboratory setting, were recorded and analyzed. Vowel and consonant durations at syllable contacts of trochaic word types with ¦CVCV or ¦CVːCV structure were measured under varying rhythmical conditions. Evidence is provided that in German non-professional singing, the two syllable structures can be differentiated by two distinct temporal variability patterns: vocalic variability (and consonantal stability) was found to be dominant in ¦CVːCV structures whereas consonantal variability (and vocalic stability) was characteristic for ¦CVCV structures. In French and Russian, however, only vocalic variability seemed to apply. Additionally, findings suggest that the different temporal patterns found in German were also supported by the stability pattern at the tonal level. These results point to subtle (supra) segmental timing mechanisms in sung speech that affect temporal targets according to the specific prosodic nature of the language in question.

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Pitch characteristics of infant-directed speech affect infants’ ability to discriminate vowels

Cited by 166 publications

References 53 publications

Auditory perception at the root of language learning

Auditory perception at the root of language learning

Fine-grained variation in caregivers’ /s/ predicts their infants’ /s/ category

Temporal Variability and Stability in Infant-Directed Sung Speech: Evidence for Language-specific Patterns

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