The Relationship Between Infants’ Production Experience and Their Processing of Speech

Majorano, Marinella; Vihman, Marilyn May; DePaolis, Rory A.

doi:10.1080/15475441.2013.829740

Cited by 86 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…Second, a perceptual CL bias might be more difficult to learn than a perceptual LC bias, because it goes against what appears to be a language-general production LC bias (which will however need to be further evaluated in future studies), as is suggested for Japanese by the adults data obtained by Tsuji et al (2012). These opposed production/perception biases might make the learning of these phonotactic dependencies more difficult, since several studies have shown the importance of the perception-production link (see Vihman, 1993;Vihman & Croft, 2007;Yeung & Werker, 2013) and the influence of production experience on infant speech processing (Keren-Portnoy, Vihman, DePaolis, Whitaker, & Williams, 2010;DePaolis, Vihman, & Keren-Portnoy, 2011;DePaolis, Vihman, & Nakai, 2013;Majorano, Vihman, & DePaolis, 2014). These different explanations are likely to be non-mutually exclusive, in particular in light of the fact that French-learning infants have been found to acquire a CL bias for fricative sequences without any developmental lag (e.g., by 10 months), a case that crucially differs from the present case in the fact that the input patterns were much clearer.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

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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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

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

et al. 2014

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“…However, infants who produced [t] frequently, instead preferred listening to words that contained a consonant they did not yet produce (i.e., [s]). Thus, infants beyond the typical age of reduplicated babble onset must have formed cognitive representations of their own regular motor production patterns and compared their representations to consonants they did not yet produce (DePaolis et al, 2013; DePaolis, Vihman, & Keren-Portnoy, 2011; Majorano, Vihman, & DePaolis, 2014). Infants’ selective listening showed they represented their own sensorimotor experience in an accessible way and that this sensorimotor experience influenced their subsequent behavior.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why repetition? Repetitive babbling, auditory feedback, and cochlear implantation

Fagan

2015

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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This study investigated the reduplicated, or repetitive vocalizations of hearing infants and infants with profound hearing loss with and without cochlear implants using a new measure of repetition in order to address questions not only about the effects of cochlear implantation on repetitive babbling, but also the reason that repetitive vocalizations occur at all and why they emerge around 7 to 8 months of age in hearing infants. Participants included 16 infants with profound hearing loss and 27 hearing infants who participated at a mean age of 9.9 months and/or a mean age of 17.7 months. Mean age at cochlear implantation for infants with profound hearing loss was 12.9 months and mean duration of implant use was 4.2 months. Before cochlear implantation, the data show repetitive vocalizations were rare. However, four months after cochlear implant activation, infants with hearing loss produced both repetitive vocalizations, and repetitions per vocalization, at levels commensurate with hearing peers. The results support the hypothesis that repetition emerges as a means of vocal exploration during the time that hearing infants (and infants with cochlear implants) form auditory-motor representations and neural connections between cortical areas active in syllable production and syllable perception, during the transition from nonlinguistic to linguistic vocalization.

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“…27 for self-organizing systems). The only available infant evidence suggesting an influence from production to perception is correlational: Infants show differential attention to those speech sounds that are in their individual babbling and/or productive repertoires (28,29). Here we test empirically whether motor processes exert a direct influence on the auditory percept.…”

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confidence: 98%

Sensorimotor influences on speech perception in infancy

Bruderer

Danielson

Kandhadai

et al. 2015

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

159

120

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The influence of speech production on speech perception is well established in adults. However, because adults have a long history of both perceiving and producing speech, the extent to which the perception-production linkage is due to experience is unknown. We addressed this issue by asking whether articulatory configurations can influence infants' speech perception performance. To eliminate influences from specific linguistic experience, we studied preverbal, 6-mo-old infants and tested the discrimination of a nonnative, and hence never-before-experienced, speech sound distinction. In three experimental studies, we used teething toys to control the position and movement of the tongue tip while the infants listened to the speech sounds. Using ultrasound imaging technology, we verified that the teething toys consistently and effectively constrained the movement and positioning of infants' tongues. With a looking-time procedure, we found that temporarily restraining infants' articulators impeded their discrimination of a nonnative consonant contrast but only when the relevant articulator was selectively restrained to prevent the movements associated with producing those sounds. Our results provide striking evidence that even before infants speak their first words and without specific listening experience, sensorimotor information from the articulators influences speech perception. These results transform theories of speech perception by suggesting that even at the initial stages of development, oral-motor movements influence speech sound discrimination. Moreover, an experimentally induced "impairment" in articulator movement can compromise speech perception performance, raising the question of whether long-term oral-motor impairments may impact perceptual development.language acquisition | perception-production | infancy T he acquisition of language, arguably our most defining human capacity, relies on the seamless exchange of information between production and perception. In their seminal work, Eimas et al. (1) found that from 1 mo of age, human infants are equipped with perceptual sensitivities that enable them to discriminate speech sounds according to the boundaries used in human languages (see refs. 2, 3 for reviews of subsequent work). Within the first year, infant speech perception sensitivities adapt to the ambient language: The process of perceptual narrowing results in a decline in discrimination of nonnative distinctions (4, 5) and an improvement in the discrimination of native speech sound contrasts (6, 7). A similar trajectory is seen for audiovisual speech perception: Very young infants can match heard and seen speech (8-10), but by 9-10 mo, they do so reliably only for native speech sounds (11). Development of speech production progresses similarly. Although the infant vocal tract is anatomically immature and lacks the neuromuscular control of the adult vocal tract (12), the ability to produce communicative sounds (cries) is evident at birth (13, 14) and already reflects characteristics of the lang...

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The Relationship Between Infants’ Production Experience and Their Processing of Speech

Cited by 86 publications

References 63 publications

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

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

Why repetition? Repetitive babbling, auditory feedback, and cochlear implantation

Sensorimotor influences on speech perception in infancy

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