Article
Psychology, Developmental
Caroline Nallet, Iris Berent, Janet F. Werker, Judit Gervain
Summary: Newborns are able to extract and learn repetition-based regularities from speech input, and this ability is not specific to speech but also applies to other auditory stimuli such as musical tones. However, the neural response to musical tones and spoken language is markedly different.
DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Kali Woodruff Carr, Danielle R. Perszyk, Sandra R. Waxman
Summary: Recent research suggests that listening to native language and vocalizations of non-human primates can support infant cognition, particularly in object categorization. However, the study on zebra finch song failed to show a similar cognitive advantage, indicating the need to further identify the range of non-linguistic acoustic signals that impact infant cognition.
Article
Acoustics
Lei He
Summary: This study investigated the rhythmic differences between native and non-native English speakers. The results showed that spectral centroid, spread, flatness, and entropy were different between the two groups, indicating the potential of these measures in characterizing rhythmic differences.
JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
(2022)
Article
Linguistics
Joseph V. Casillas, Juan Jose Garrido-Pozu, Kyle Parrish, Laura Fernandez Arroyo, Nicole Rodriguez, Robert Esposito, Isabelle Chang, Kimberly Gomez, Gabriela Constantin-Dureci, Jiawei Shao, Ivan Andreu Rascon, Katherine Taveras
Summary: This study examines the influence of proficiency and empathy on the development of second language prosody in L2 Spanish. The findings show that learner accuracy and sensitivity to intonation increase with higher proficiency levels, and that individual empathy levels affect both accuracy and processing. Higher empathic individuals demonstrate greater sensitivity to intonation cues in forming sound-meaning associations, indicating the importance of including measures of pragmatic skill, such as empathy, in second language acquisition studies.
APPLIED PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
(2023)
Article
Education & Educational Research
Gerda Ana Melnik-Leroy, Rory Turnbull, Sharon Peperkamp
Summary: This study examines the relationship between perception and production in second language phonological processing, finding a strong connection within processing levels but not across levels. Good perception is shown to be a prerequisite for good production, based on the results of clustering analysis.
SECOND LANGUAGE RESEARCH
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Natalie Fecher, Elizabeth K. Johnson
Summary: The study investigates the development of children's talker recognition abilities. The findings suggest that early developmental improvements are primarily influenced by specific knowledge in familiar languages, with limited enhancement in unfamiliar languages.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Bob McMurray, Keith S. Apfelbaum, J. Bruce Tomblin
Summary: Words are fundamental to language, and understanding how lexical knowledge is acquired and processed is crucial for language development. Real-time measures of children's processing of familiar words reveal that word recognition skills develop slowly and can be characterized by changes in activation rate. In addition, language disorders may be linked to differences in competition resolution and deficits in inhibition.
CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Linguistics
Katerina Chladkova, Paul Boersma, Paola Escudero
Summary: Listeners are sensitive to probability distributions of speech sounds. Distributional training can shift existing phoneme boundaries pre-attentively, and this effect is more evident in second-language phoneme contrasts similar to native ones.
BILINGUALISM-LANGUAGE AND COGNITION
(2022)
Review
Neurosciences
Mihye Choi, Mohinish Shukla
Summary: Both adults and young children demonstrate remarkable sensitivity and systematic abilities in processing speech signals despite speaker variability, utilizing this variation for further information processing, particularly in word learning situations. This suggests that speaker-specific information processing plays a crucial role in language acquisition and phoneme learning in infancy.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Katharina H. Menn, Claudia Maennel, Lars Meyer
Summary: Infants' slow brain activity in the early stage restricts their initial processing abilities. However, they are able to acquire the short-lived speech sounds of their native language during their first year. The study shows that infants gradually acquire phoneme features that extend over longer time intervals to adapt to their slow processing abilities.
Article
Acoustics
Julien Millasseau, Laurence Bruggeman, Ivan Yuen, Katherine Demuth
Summary: The study examined voicing contrasts in word-initial stops produced by Australian English-speaking children aged 4-5. Results showed that while the children could distinguish between voiced and voiceless stops, their voice onset time and closure duration were different from those of adults, indicating that children of this age are still developing appropriate timing and articulatory adjustments for voicing contrasts.
JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
(2021)
Article
Biology
Tim Sainburg, Anna Mai, Timothy Q. Gentner
Summary: Human language relies on hierarchically organized, long-range relationships, which follow a power-law decay. This decay is not exclusive to linguistic structure, as non-linguistic behaviors in other species also demonstrate similar long-range statistical dependencies. In human speech, these statistical dependencies are present at the earliest detectable ages, prior to the production of complex linguistic structure.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(2022)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Solene Inceoglu
Summary: The study found that both native and non-native speakers perform better in audiovisual and auditory-only conditions for French vowel perception, with differing confusion patterns across modalities. The weaker sensitivity to visual information among non-native speakers contributes to the lack of audiovisual benefit. Additionally, there was a significant relationship between subjective word familiarity and perception of non-native contrasts in audiovisual and auditory-only conditions.
LANGUAGE AND SPEECH
(2022)
Review
Neurosciences
Joan Birules, Louise Goupil, Jeremie Josse, Mathilde Fort
Summary: In recent decades, developmental linguists have shown the importance of perceiving talking faces audio-visually for early language acquisition. This is achieved through laboratory studies and research on how infants learn novel words and deploy visual attention during naturalistic play. However, there are still factors, such as social contingency, speaker characteristics, and task-dependencies, that have not been thoroughly studied and yet play an important role in infants' attention to talking faces during social interactions. Future research should address these issues to narrow the knowledge gap between experimental studies and infants' real-life language environment.
Article
Linguistics
Bianca Brown, Botagoz Tusmagambet, Valentino Rahming, Chun-Ying Tu, Michael B. DeSalvo, Seth Wiener
Summary: This study failed to replicate Reid et al.'s findings on the rating bias of non-native English speech among a wider population sample of native speakers (n = 189). The differences in methods (in-person vs. online) and/or participants may account for the discrepancy. The study concludes that the concept of nativeness is influenced by culture-specific perspectives surrounding language use.
APPLIED PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
(2023)