Toddlers’ sensitivity to within-word coarticulation during spoken word recognition: Developmental differences in lexical competition

Zamuner, Tania S.; Moore, Charlotte E.; Desmeules-Trudel, Félix

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2016.07.012

Cited by 19 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Two experiments showed that the duration of vowel nasalization has a major impact on the recognition of words containing a contrast between phonological nasal (CṼ) and coarticulatory nasalized (CVN) vowels in Canadian French. This influence was predicted based on the production of the contrast in Canadian French (Desmeules-Trudel & Brunelle, 2018), and on previous results obtained in English by Beddor et al (2013) and Zamuner et al (2016). For instance, Desmeules-Trudel and Brunelle found that phonological nasal vowels are produced significantly differently from coarticulated nasalized vowels in Canadian French throughout their duration.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 63%

“…In addition to providing support for the gradient interpretation hypothesis, our results provide support for the storage of fine-grained phonetic cues in phonological representations (McMurray et al, 2002), as listeners were (sometimes) able to consider short variations in the signal in order to categorize the stimuli, even though the phonetic cue is involved in contrasting vowel phonemes, similarly to studies on VOT (McMurray et al, 2008;McMurray et al, 2002). The fact that listeners are able to use fine-grained phonetics for higher order language processing has been found in English using a variety of phonetic cues, such as VOT and length of vowel transitions (McMurray et al, 2008), direction of vowel transitions (Dahan et al, 2001), and vowel nasalization (Beddor et al, 2013;Zamuner et al, 2016), as well as in bilingual adults (Desmeules-Trudel, 2018). Furthermore, listeners are able to use these cues, but do not seem to do so when stimuli are simpler.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

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Gradient and categorical patterns of spoken-word recognition and processing of phonetic details

Desmeules-Trudel

Zamuner

2019

Atten Percept Psychophys

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The speech signal is inherently rich, and this reflects complexities of speech articulation. During spoken-word recognition, listeners must process time-dependent perceptual cues, and the role that these cues play varies depending on the phonological status of the sounds across languages. For example, Canadian French has both phonologically nasal vowels (i.e., contrastive) and coarticulatorily nasalized vowels, as opposed to English, which only has coarticulatorily nasalized vowels. We investigated how vowel nasalization duration, a time-dependent phonetic cue to the French nasal contrast, affects spoken-word recognition. Using eye tracking in two visual world paradigm experiments, the results show that fine-grained phonetic information is important for lexical recognition, and that lexical access is dependent on small variations in the signal. The results also show gradient interpretation of ambiguous vowel nasalization despite the phonemic distinction between phonological nasal vowels and coarticulatorily nasalized vowels in Canadian French. Gradience was found when words were ambiguous, and interpretation was more categorical when words were unambiguous. These results support the hypothesis of gradient interpretation of phonetic cues for ambiguously produced stimuli and the storage of coarticulatory information in phono-lexical representations for a language that has a phonological contrast for nasality (i.e., French).Keywords Eye tracking . Coarticulation processing . Vowel nasalization . Gradience . Spoken-word recognition During speech processing, listeners are presented with timedependent and variable, fine-grained acoustic cues for phoneme and word recognition. These cues include within-category variability and coarticulation, which is the result of the overlap of adjacent sounds' articulatory movements (Fowler, 1980). These cues were traditionally considered redundant for formal theories of phonetic, phonological, and lexical representations (

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 63%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Gradient and categorical patterns of spoken-word recognition and processing of phonetic details

Desmeules-Trudel

Zamuner

2019

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…Results showed that participants fixated faster on the target image when the recording contained assimilated nasal consonants, suggesting that participants used their knowledge of this process to anticipate the identity of an upcoming consonant. Similar effects have been found for other cues as well, including vowel formant transitions (Dahan et al 2001;Salverda et al 2014;Mahr et al 2015;Paquette-Smith et al 2016), vowel nasalization (Beddor et al 2013;Paquette-Smith et al 2016;Zamuner et al 2016, Desmeules-Trudel andZamuner 2019), and segment duration (Salverda et al 2003;Blazej and Cohen-Goldberg 2015).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 74%

“…The long-distance nature of sibilant harmony and other types of consonant harmony is of particular interest when we consider its potential to facilitate language processing. A growing body of research has demonstrated that during spoken word recognition, listeners can use a variety of cues to anticipate an upcoming sound before it is realized (Dahan et al 2001;Salverda et al 2003Salverda et al , 2014Gow and McMurray 2007;Beddor et al 2013;Mahr et al 2015;Blazej and Cohen-Goldberg 2015;Paquette-Smith et al 2016;Zamuner et al 2016, Desmeules-Trudel andZamuner 2019). This literature, however, has focused on local dependencies between adjacent segments, as opposed to long-distance phenomena.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of long-distance phonological processes in spoken word recognition: A preliminary investigation

Burness

McMullin

Zamuner

2019

TWPL

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Previous work has demonstrated that during spoken word recognition, listeners can use a variety of cues to anticipate an upcoming sound before the sound is encountered. However, this vein of research has largely focused on local phenomena that hold between adjacent sounds. In order to fill this gap, we combine the Visual World Paradigm with an Artificial Language Learning methodology to investigate whether knowledge of a long-distance pattern of sibilant harmony can be utilized during spoken word recognition. The hypothesis was that participants trained on sibilant harmony could more quickly identify a target word from among a set of competitors when that target contained a prefix which had undergone regressive sibilant harmony. Participants tended to behave as expected for the subset of items that they saw during training, but the effect did not reach statistical significance and did not extend to novel items. This suggests that participants did not learn the rule of sibilant harmony and may have been memorizing which base went with which alternant. Failure to learn the pattern may have been due to certain aspects of the design, which will be addressed in future iterations of the experiment.

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“…Some studies have suggested that toddlers (Mahr, McMillan, Saffran, Weismer, & Edwards, 2015) and young children (Zamuner, Moore, & Desmeules-Trudel, 2016) can use coarticulatory information in this manner, whereas other studies have found no evidence that 2-year-olds' use of this type of information (Minaudo & Johnson, 2013).…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

Two-year-olds’ sensitivity to subphonemic mismatch during online spoken word recognition

Paquette‐Smith

Fecher

Johnson

2016

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Sensitivity to noncontrastive subphonemic detail plays an important role in adult speech processing, but little is known about children's use of this information during online word recognition. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigate 2-year-olds' sensitivity to a specific type of subphonemic detail: coarticulatory mismatch. In Experiment 1, toddlers viewed images of familiar objects (e.g., a boat and a book) while hearing labels containing appropriate or inappropriate coarticulation. Inappropriate coarticulation was created by cross-splicing the coda of the target word onto the onset of another word that shared the same onset and nucleus (e.g., to create boat, the final consonant of boat was cross-spliced onto the initial CV of bone). We tested 24-month-olds and 29-month-olds in this paradigm. Both age groups behaved similarly, readily detecting the inappropriate coarticulation (i.e., showing better recognition of identity-spliced than cross-spliced items). In Experiment 2, we asked how children's sensitivity to subphonemic mismatch compared to their sensitivity to phonemic mismatch. Twenty-nine-month-olds were presented with targets that contained either a phonemic (e.g., the final consonant of boat was spliced onto the initial CV of bait) or a subphonemic mismatch (e.g., the final consonant of boat was spliced onto the initial CV of bone). Here, the subphonemic (coarticulatory) mismatch was not nearly as disruptive to children's word recognition as a phonemic mismatch. Taken together, our findings support the view that 2-year-olds, like adults, use subphonemic information to optimize online word recognition.

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Toddlers’ sensitivity to within-word coarticulation during spoken word recognition: Developmental differences in lexical competition

Cited by 19 publications

References 34 publications

Gradient and categorical patterns of spoken-word recognition and processing of phonetic details

Gradient and categorical patterns of spoken-word recognition and processing of phonetic details

The role of long-distance phonological processes in spoken word recognition: A preliminary investigation

Two-year-olds’ sensitivity to subphonemic mismatch during online spoken word recognition

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