PRIMIR: A Developmental Framework of Infant Speech Processing

Werker, Janet F.; Curtin, Suzanne

doi:10.1207/s15473341lld0102_4

Cited by 345 publications

(190 citation statements)

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“…In theories of language acquisition, it is usually assumed that information from 'higher levels' such as lexical or semantic information influences phonetic discrimination only after they are established (e.g., Pierrehumbert, 2003;Werker & Curtin, 2005). However, the evidence from modeling studies shows that phonological category acquisition and word learning might go hand in hand (Feldman et al, 2009;Martin et al, 2013).…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead, current theories of first language acquisition argue that perceptual reorganization occurs mainly through bottom-up learning from speech input (e.g., Kuhl et al, 2008;Pierrehumbert, 2003;Werker & Curtin, 2005). One such learning mechanism is that infants keep track of the frequency distributions of sounds in their input, and create categories for these speech sounds accordingly.…”

Section: Distribution-driven Learning Of Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most theories argue that infants' phonetic categories emerge from observing these frequency peaks in their input, while the adult perceptual system may also incorporate feedback from other levels of representation (e.g., Pierrehumbert, 2003: 138;Werker & Curtin, 2005). In this view, infants develop phonetic categories before they start to store word forms and add meaning.…”

Section: Distribution-driven Learning Of Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Distribution-driven Learning Of Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Distribution-driven Learning Of Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Schure

Junge

Boersma

2016

Infant Behavior and Development

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“…However, they are not fully tuned to any specific language input (Werker & Tees, 2002;Werker & Curtin, 2005). The development of their auditory system is not completed yet, but is considered adult-like in terms of frequency selectivity (Spetner & Olsho, 1990 ;Abdala & Folsom, 1995).…”

Section: Our Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discrimination of voicing (aba vs. apa)on the basis of Envelope temporal cues in 6-month old infants

Bertoncini¹,

Cabrera²,

Lorenzi³

2010

Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

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Several studies indicate that profoundly deaf children receiving a cochlear implant (CI) under the age of 2 years are able to develop linguistic skills at a rate equal to similarly aged children with normal hearing. CI devices deliver temporal envelope (E) cues in speech over a small number of frequency channels. This suggests that infants are able to use E speech cues efficiently at an early age. However, little work has been done to investigate the developmental time course of the ability to use E speech cues. A recent study suggests that normal hearing children are able to use such cues at adult levels by the age of 5 years, but information is lacking for younger children. The present study assessed the ability of 6-month-old infants with normal hearing to discriminate between voiced and unvoiced stop consonants (/aba/ versus /apa/) on the basis of E cues, using a Head-turn Preference Procedure and speech tokens processed via a noise vocoder. The spectral and temporal resolution of vocoders was varied to determine whether or not the ability to use E speech cues is similarly constrained in infants and adults.

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“…This is despite the fact that children of this age were shown to be 217 able to discriminate /p/ and/d/ outside of the context of a word learning task. This effect has 218 been demonstrated many times (see Werker & Curtin, 2005, for a review), critically, 219 however, Rost and McMurray (2009) demonstrated that it is affected by the variability of the 220 exposure set. Using a similar switch task to Stager and Werker (1997), they replicated the 221 null effect when the novel words (/buk/ and /puk/ in their study) were produced by a single 222 talker, but showed that infants of the same age did differentiate between the minimal-pair VOT in a clear bimodal distribution while holding talker constant.…”

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confidence: 99%

High or low? Comparing high and low-variability phonetic training in adult and child second language learners

Giannakopoulou

Brown

Clayards

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Background. High talker variability (i.e. multiple voices in the input) has been found effective in training non-native phonetic contrasts in adults. A small number of studies suggest that children also benefit from high-variability phonetic training with some evidence that they show greater learning (more plasticity) than adults given matched input, although results are mixed. However no study has directly compared the effectiveness of high versus low talker variability in children. Methods. Native Greek speaking 8-year-olds (N=52), and adults (N=41) were exposed to the English /i/-/ɪ/ contrast in ten training sessions through a computerized word learning game. Pre-and posttraining tests examined discrimination of the contrast as well as lexical learning. Participants were randomly assigned to high (4 talkers) or low (1 talker) variability training conditions. Results. Both age groups improved during training, and both improved more while trained with a single talker. Results of a 3-interval oddity discrimination test did not show the predicted benefit of high-variability in training in either age group. Instead, children showed an effect in the reverse direction -i.e. reliably greater improvements in discrimination following single talker training, even for untrained generalization items, although the result is qualified by (accidental) differences in participant groups at pre-test. Adults showed a numeric advantage for high-variability but were inconsistent with respect to voice and word novelty. In addition, no effect of variability was found for lexical learning. There was no evidence of greater plasticity for phonetic learning in child learners. Discussion. This paper adds to the handful of studies demonstrating that, like adults, child learners can improve their discrimination of a phonetic contrast via computerized training. There was no evidence of a benefit of training with multiple talkers, either for discrimination or word learning. The results also do not support the findings of greater plasticity in child learning found in a previous paper (Giannakopoulou et al., 2013a). We discuss these results in terms of various differences between training and test tasks used in the current work compared with previous literature.PeerJ Preprints | https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2870v2 | CC BY 4.0 Open Access |

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PRIMIR: A Developmental Framework of Infant Speech Processing

Cited by 345 publications

References 116 publications

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Discrimination of voicing (aba vs. apa)on the basis of Envelope temporal cues in 6-month old infants

High or low? Comparing high and low-variability phonetic training in adult and child second language learners

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