The role of production abilities in the perception of consonant category in infants

Abstract

The influence of motor knowledge on speech perception is well established, but the functional role of the motor system is still poorly understood. The present study explores the hypothesis that speech production abilities may help infants discover phonetic categories in the speech stream, in spite of coarticulation effects. To this aim, we examined the influence of babbling abilities on consonant categorization in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants. Using an intersensory matching procedure, we investigated the infants’ capacity to associate auditory information about a consonant in various vowel contexts with visual information about the same consonant, and to map auditory and visual information onto a common phoneme representation. Moreover, a parental questionnaire evaluated the infants’ consonantal repertoire. In a first experiment using /b/–/d/ consonants, we found that infants who displayed babbling abilities and produced the /b/ and/or the /d/ consonants in repetitive sequences were able to correctly perform intersensory matching, while non‐babblers were not. In a second experiment using the /v/–/z/ pair, which is as visually contrasted as the /b/–/d/ pair but which is usually not produced at the tested ages, no significant matching was observed, for any group of infants, babbling or not. These results demonstrate, for the first time, that the emergence of babbling could play a role in the extraction of vowel‐independent representations for consonant place of articulation. They have important implications for speech perception theories, as they highlight the role of sensorimotor interactions in the development of phoneme representations during the first year of life.

Measuring children’s auditory statistical learning via serial recall

“…Measuring linguistic ASL through serial recall has several advantages. First, it takes advantage of established empirical links between speech perception and production across the lifespan (e.g., Glanz et al, 2018;Vihman, 2017;Vilain et al, 2019;Wilson et al, 2004). Second, the method has a long tradition in research on verbal memory and learning.…”

“…First, there is good evidence for a direct link between the speech perception and production systems. Neuroimaging studies with adults show that motor areas involved in speech production are activated during perception tasks (e.g., Glanz et al, 2018;Wilson, Saygin, Sereno, & Iacoboni, 2004), and there is strong evidence identifying this link as an important basis for early language development (e.g., Vihman, 2017;Vilain, Dole, Loevenbruck, Pascalis, & Schwartz, 2019). Thus, we can assume a relatively direct link between speech perception during familiarization and speech production at test.…”

Spoken Language Development and the Challenge of Skill Integration

“…Milestones and developmental stages have long been identified in various developmental domains (e.g., walking: Thelen and Smith, 1994;perception: e.g. Best, 1994;Maye et al, 2002;Werker, 2018; spoken language: e.g., Kuhl, 2011; language processing: e.g., Vilain et al, 2019) and provide researchers with referential landmarks for a better understanding of typical trajectories, as well as useful tools for the diagnosis and prediction of potential deviations from typical pathways. In the domain of spoken language development, canonical babbling stands as an undisputed milestone allowing children to move toward a more complex quality of the speech production skill (e.g., production of the first meaningful words).…”

Orthogonal neural codes for speech in the infant brain

“…During the first semester infants are thought to analyze speech merely along domaingeneral spectrotemporal dimensions (Kuhl, 2004). They would gradually converge to an adult-like phonetic space only later, through native language exposure and the motor feedback provided by the progressive acquisition of articulatory/motor skills (Kuhl et al, 2008;Westermann & Reck Miranda, 2004;Vilain et al, 2019). Yet, from birth on, infants are capable of perceiving stable speech segments despite acoustical variations.…”