Articulating What Infants Attune to in Native Speech

Abstract

To become language users, infants must embrace the integrality of speech perception and production. That they do so, and quite rapidly, is implied by the native-language attunement they achieve in each domain by 6–12 months. Yet research has most often addressed one or the other domain, rarely how they interrelate. Moreover, mainstream assumptions that perception relies on acoustic patterns whereas production involves motor patterns entail that the infant would have to translate incommensurable information to grasp the perception-production relationship. We posit the more parsimonious view that both domains depend on commensurate articulatory information. Our proposed framework combines principles of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and Articulatory Phonology (AP). According to PAM, infants attune to articulatory information in native speech and detect similarities of non-native phones to native articulatory patterns. The AP premise that gestures of the speech organs are the basic elements of phonology offers articulatory similarity metrics, while satisfying the requirement that phonological information be discrete and contrastive: 1) distinct articulatory organs produce vocal tract constrictions; 2) phonological contrasts recruit different articulators, and/or constrictions of a given articulator that differ in degree or location. Various lines of research suggest young children perceive articulatory information, which guides their productions: discrimination of between- versus within-organ contrasts; simulations of attunement to language-specific articulatory distributions; multi-modal speech perception; oral/vocal imitation; perceptual effects of articulator activation or suppression. We conclude that articulatory gesture information serves as the foundation for developmental integrality of speech perception and production. … each blind man felt a part of the animal in his reach, reporting that it was like a wall; a snake; a tree; a fan … “Each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong”(Saxe, 1873, pp. 135–136)

Emergence of an Action Repository as Part of a Biologically Inspired Model of Speech Processing: The Role of Somatosensory Information in Learning Phonetic-Phonological Sound Features

“…It can be hypothesized that place of articulation is perhaps learned earlier and as fast as manner of articulation if training not uses only auditory information but somatosensory information as well. This hypothesis is in line with the Articulatory Organ Hypothesis (Tyler et al, 2014; Best et al, 2016) which stresses the importance of the role of active articulators in production also for perception and thus for speech learning already in the first year of lifetime. Indeed an earlier and faster separation of syllables with respect to place of articulation and thus an earlier and faster learning of this feature has been found in this study for the case of availability of auditory and somatosensory information compared to the case of auditory information only.…”

“…If we assume that only a sparse phonological representation exists at the beginning of speech acquisition (cf. Best et al, 2016), the emergence of the action repository as well as of the mental lexicon has to start with a sparse organization at the beginning of the acquisition process. Therefore we developed an approach comprising a direct neural association between conceptual lexical and sensorimotor syllabic representations of speech items.…”

Speech Production From a Developmental Perspective

“…The ecological dynamics approach to speech production is best represented by articulatory phonology (Browman & Goldstein, 1992, and subsequent), a task-dynamic approach to articulation (Kelso et al, 1986;Saltzman & Kelso, 1987;Saltzman & Munhall, 1989), and by ecological theories of speech perception (Best, 1995;Fowler, 1986;Galantucci et al, 2006;Goldstein & Fowler, 2003) and speech sound acquisition (Best, 1995;Best, Goldstein, Nam, & Tyler, 2016). The fundamental unit of analysis is a vocal tract constriction that serves as an articulatory attractor.…”

“…This unit is known as a gesture. Gestures are linguistic primitives, similar to distinctive features in generative theory, that emerge during development under the assumption that infants acquire "a relation between actions of distinct (articulatory) organs and lexical units very early in the process of developing language" (Goldstein & Fowler, 2003, p. 35; see also Best et al, 2016). Gestures are defined as "events that unfold during speech production and whose consequences can be observed in the movements of the speech articulators" (Browman & Goldstein, 1992, p. 156).…”

Demystifying infant vocal imitation: The roles of mouth looking and speaker’s gaze

“…In addition to motor resonance, recent studies have also shown pervasive connections between speech perception and production (e.g. Best, Goldstein, Nam, & Tyler, 2016;Schmitz, Díaz, Rubio, & Sebastian-Galles, 2018). According to these accounts, vocal imitation may therefore be facilitated by watching…”