Understanding the developing sound system: interactions between sounds and words

Curtin, Suzanne; Zamuner, Tania S.

doi:10.1002/wcs.1307

Cited by 18 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 146 publications

(220 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The simulations reported in those two studies, which use much more phonetic variation than we did in our small simulation, show that learning words simultaneously with phonological categories results in a more accurate set of categories than when they are learned just from the phonetic information (Feldman et al, 2009;Martin et al, 2013). Thus, it seems that phonetic learning and word learning simultaneously affect each other (for a review, see Curtin & Zamuner, 2014). When cues from another level are reliable and consistent, infants may benefit from these cues in their phonetic learning.…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 58%

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Schure

Junge

Boersma

2016

Infant Behavior and Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 58%

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Schure

Junge

Boersma

2016

Infant Behavior and Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Effects of production are also expected to depend on the developmental stage of the learner and the difficulty of the task as seen in other domains of language development; these effects are modeled in PRIMIR (Processing Rich Information from Multi-dimensional Interactive Representations; Curtin, Byers-Heinlein, & Werker, 2011;Werker & Curtin, 2005). As children learn language, they spontaneously produce speech, and the impact of these productions has also been investigated in language learners (Curtin & Zamuner, 2014). In the current study, we manipulated whether participants produced the non-words during training.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spoken word recognition of novel words, either produced or only heard during learning

Zamuner

Morin-Lessard

Strahm

et al. 2016

Journal of Memory and Language

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This document is the Accepted Manuscript Version of the following article: Tania S. Zamuner, Elizabeth Morin-Lessard, Stephanie Strahm, and Michael P. A. Page, 'Soke word recognition of novel words, either produced or only heard during learning', Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 89, August 2016, pp. 55-67, doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2015.10.003. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 1 December 2017. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Psycholinguistic models of spoken word production differ in how they conceptualize the relationship between lexical, phonological and output representations, making different predictions for the role of production in language acquisition and language processing. This work examines the impact of production on spoken word recognition of newly learned non-words. In Experiment 1, adults were trained on non-words with visual referents; during training, they produced half of the non-words, with the other half being heard-only. Using a visual world paradigm at test, eye tracking results indicated faster recognition of non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. In Experiment 2, non-words were correctly pronounced or mispronounced at test. Participants showed a different pattern of recognition for mispronunciation on non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. Together these results indicate that production affects the representations of newly learned words

show abstract

“…With this, they will build all of the words and potentially infinite number of sentences in language over life . The young baby's paradoxical tacit capacity to segment and categorize into stable discrete sound units the constantly varying linguistic stream is thought to be at the heart of this remarkable phonological capacity and widely assumed to be utterly essential for healthy language learning, and, later, for masterful phonetic sound‐to‐letter decoding as a young reader …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual sign phonology: insights into human reading and language from a natural soundless phonology

Petitto

Langdon

Stone

et al. 2016

WIRES Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Among the most prevailing assumptions in science and society about the human reading process is that sound and sound-based phonology are critical to young readers. The child's sound-to-letter decoding is viewed as universal and vital to deriving meaning from print. We offer a different view. The crucial link for early reading success is not between segmental sounds and print. Instead the human brain's capacity to segment, categorize, and discern linguistic patterning makes possible the capacity to segment all languages. This biological process includes the segmentation of languages on the hands in signed languages. Exposure to natural sign language in early life equally affords the child's discovery of silent segmental units in visual sign phonology (VSP) that can also facilitate segmental decoding of print. We consider powerful biological evidence about the brain, how it builds sound and sign phonology, and why sound and sign phonology are equally important in language learning and reading. We offer a testable theoretical account, reading model, and predictions about how VSP can facilitate segmentation and mapping between print and meaning. We explain how VSP can be a powerful facilitator of all children's reading success (deaf and hearing)-an account with profound transformative impact on learning to read in deaf children with different language backgrounds. The existence of VSP has important implications for understanding core properties of all human language and reading, challenges assumptions about language and reading as being tied to sound, and provides novel insight into a remarkable biological equivalence in signed and spoken languages. WIREs Cogn Sci 2016, 7:366-381. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1404 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

show abstract

Understanding the developing sound system: interactions between sounds and words

Abstract: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Cited by 18 publications

References 146 publications

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

Spoken word recognition of novel words, either produced or only heard during learning

Visual sign phonology: insights into human reading and language from a natural soundless phonology

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About