The effect of segmental order on fricative labeling by children and adults

Nittrouer, Susan; Miller, Marnie E.; Crowther, Court S.; Manhart, Mary Jane

doi:10.3758/bf03205548

Cited by 34 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…For example, Hazan and Barrett (2000) found that children were more consistent in identification when multiple cues were available compared to when only a single cue was available suggesting that children lack the flexibility to use whatever cue was available. Nittrouer et al (2000) came to a similar conclusion in a study of 5-and 7-year-old children, and Johnson's (2000) observation that even 15-year-olds performed more poorly than adults in speech identification in the presence of noise or reverberation also is consistent with this idea.…”

Section: Flexibility In the Use Of Acoustic Informationsupporting

confidence: 73%

Issues in human auditory development

Werner

2007

Journal of Communication Disorders

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The human auditory system is often portrayed as precocious in its development. In fact, many aspects of basic auditory processing appear to be adult-like by the middle of the first year of postnatal life. However, processes such as attention and sound source determination take much longer to develop. Immaturity of higher-level processes limits the processing of both simple and complex sounds by infants and children. Young listeners with impaired hearing may be at a particular disadvantage, in that they must make sense of sounds on the basis of a degraded representation using immature perceptual strategies.Learning outcomes-(1) Readers will be able to describe three stages of human auditory development. (2) Readers will be able to describe how experience with sound is important in auditory development. (3) Readers will be able to describe the role of attention and other higher-level processes in early audition.

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Section: Flexibility In the Use Of Acoustic Informationsupporting

confidence: 73%

Issues in human auditory development

Werner

2007

Journal of Communication Disorders

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“…The kind of evidence that would have supported the first hypothesis would have been evidence that showed that children are less sensitive to changes in static spectral properties than adults, but more sensitive than adults to changes in dynamic spectral properties (i.e., frequency glides). That finding would have supported the absolute-differences hypothesis because children have been found to weight static spectral properties less and dynamic spectral properties more than adults (e.g., Nittrouer, 1992;Nittrouer et al, 2000;Parnell & Amerman, 1978;Siren & Wilcox, 1995). Supporting the second hypothesis would have been evidence that adults are more sensitive to static than they are to dynamic spectral properties, and that children are more sensitive to dynamic than they are to static spectral properties.…”

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confidence: 93%

“…When formant transitions were added, 4-year-olds' recognition scores improved to 76%. Numerous studies have also shown that young children (i.e., 3−8 years of age) do not weight fricative noise as much as adults in decisions of place for word-initial fricatives, but instead weight formant transitions at voicing onset greatly (e.g., Mayo, Scobbie, Hewlett, & Waters, 2003;Nittrouer, 1992;Nittrouer, Miller, Crowther, & Manhart, 2000;Siren & Wilcox, 1995).…”

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confidence: 99%

Children’s Weighting Strategies for Word-Final Stop Voicing Are Not Explained by Auditory Sensitivities

Nittrouer

Lowenstein

2007

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: It has been reported that children and adults weight differently the various acoustic properties of the speech signal that support phonetic decisions. This finding is generally attributed to the fact that the amount of weight assigned to various acoustic properties by adults varies across languages, and that children have not yet discovered the mature weighting strategies of their own native languages. But an alternative explanation exists: Perhaps children's auditory sensitivities for some acoustic properties of speech are poorer than those of adults, and children cannot categorize stimuli based on properties to which they are not keenly sensitive. The purpose of the current study was to test that hypothesis.Method: Edited-natural, synthetic-formant, and sine wave stimuli were all used, and all were modeled after words with voiced and voiceless final stops. Adults and children (5 and 7 years of age) listened to pairs of stimuli in 5 conditions: 2 involving a temporal property (1 with speech and 1 with nonspeech stimuli) and 3 involving a spectral property (1 with speech and 2 with nonspeech stimuli). An AX discrimination task was used in which a standard stimulus (A) was compared with all other stimuli (X) equal numbers of times (method of constant stimuli).Results: Adults and children had similar difference thresholds (i.e., 50% point on the discrimination function) for 2 of the 3 sets of nonspeech stimuli (1 temporal and 1 spectral), but children's thresholds were greater for both sets of speech stimuli. Conclusion:Results are interpreted as evidence that children's auditory sensitivities are adequate to support weighting strategies similar to those of adults, and so observed differences between children and adults in speech perception cannot be explained by differences in auditory perception. Furthermore, it is concluded that listeners bring expectations to the listening task about the nature of the signals they are hearing based on their experiences with those signals. Keywordschildren; weighting strategies; auditory; speech perception When two words differ by just a single phonetic segment, numerous differences can arise in articulatory organization across the entire lengths of the words. For example, English permits a phonetic distinction in the voicing of final stops (e.g., cap/cab, wait/wade, and duck/dug). Superficially, this distinction would seem trivial: The vocal folds abduct sooner in the production of words with voiceless rather than voiced final stops. In truth, the organization of the whole word differs as a function of the voicing of the final stop. The jaw lowers faster and moves to more open positions in syllables with voiceless, rather than voiced, final stops (Gracco, 1994;Summers, 1987). In words with voiceless final stops the jaw is also quicker to close (Summers, 1987), and the tongue is quicker to move away from its vowel-related posture

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“…Although infants begin to become perceptually tuned to the characteristics of L1 already in the first year ͑Jusczyk, 1997; Kuhl et al, 1992;Werker and Tees, 1984͒, this process ultimately takes significant time to develop to adultlike perception ͑e.g., Morrongiello et al, 1984;Nittrouer et al, 1998;Nittrouer et al, 2000;Nittrouer, 2004;Parnell and Amerman, 1978͒. Specifically, children appear to apply different weightings to acoustic dimensions in perceiving L1 speech categories ͑Hazan and Barrett, 2000; Mayo and Turk, 2004;Nittrouer, 2004͒.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cue weighting in auditory categorization: Implications for first and second language acquisition

Holt

Lotto

2006

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

257

274

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The ability to integrate and weight information across dimensions is central to perception and is particularly important for speech categorization. The present experiments investigate cue weighting by training participants to categorize sounds drawn from a two-dimensional acoustic space defined by the center frequency ͑CF͒ and modulation frequency ͑MF͒ of frequency-modulated sine waves. These dimensions were psychophysically matched to be equally discriminable and, in the first experiment, were equally informative for accurate categorization. Nevertheless, listeners' category responses reflected a bias for use of CF. This bias remained even when the informativeness of CF was decreased by shifting distributions to create more overlap in CF. A reversal of weighting ͑MF over CF͒ was obtained when distribution variance was increased for CF. These results demonstrate that even when equally informative and discriminable, acoustic cues are not necessarily equally weighted in categorization; listeners exhibit biases when integrating multiple acoustic dimensions. Moreover, changes in weighting strategies can be affected by changes in input distribution parameters. This methodology provides potential insights into acquisition of speech sound categories, particularly second language categories. One implication is that ineffective cue weighting strategies for phonetic categories may be alleviated by manipulating variance of uninformative dimensions in training stimuli.

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The effect of segmental order on fricative labeling by children and adults

Cited by 34 publications

References 68 publications

Issues in human auditory development

Issues in human auditory development

Children’s Weighting Strategies for Word-Final Stop Voicing Are Not Explained by Auditory Sensitivities

Cue weighting in auditory categorization: Implications for first and second language acquisition

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