Auditory-linguistic sensitivity in early infancy.

Trehub, Sandra E.; Rabinovitch, M. Sam

doi:10.1037/h0032197

Cited by 95 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…A similar conclusion was expressed by Streeter and Landauer (1976) in the interpretation of their finding that Kikuyu children were able to discriminate VOT contrasts lying in the region of the English contrast (i.e., + 10 vs. +40 msec VOT) without experience with that acoustic-phonetic contrast. It is noteworthy that the strongest evidence for infant discrimination of synthetic stop consonants that contrast in VOT also occurs for contrasts which bracket the English phoneme boundary (Eilers, Gavin, & Wilson, 1979;Eimas, 1975;Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971;Trehub & Rabinovitch, 1972). Infant discrimination of degrees of voicing lead have been difficult to demonstrate (Eilers et aI., 1979;Lasky, Syrdal-Lasky, & Klein, 1975;Streeter, 1976), except for infants from a language in which voicing lead is phonemic.…”

Section: Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The modification of speech perception and production in second-language learning

Williams

1979

Perception & Psychophysics

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Seventy-two native Spanish speaking children enrolled in programs to teach English as a second language and 24 monolingual English children were tested in speech perception and production tasks with the purpose of determining whether or not there is learning at the phonetic level during second-language acquisition. Performance with the phonetic feature voicing was studied by means of measuring changes in the perception and production of the acoustic property voice onset time. Variables of interest across Spanish-speaking subjects were degree of exposure to English and age. Age was the only group variable for the English-speaking subjects. Results with the Spanish-speaking children showed significant changes in both perception and production of voicing towards the English monolingual pattern. Age had a significant effect in production, but not in perception. It was concluded that learning at the phonetic level does occur during second-language acquisition.Resurging interest in improved methods for teaching a second language has stimulated a concomitant growth in related research (Hakuta & Cancino, 1977;Segalowitz, 1976). However, studies directed towards an understanding of second-language learning at the phonological and phonetic levels have been remarkably scarce, despite the fact that "native-like" pronunciation of the new tongue will depend upon considerable mastery of its phonological system and phonetic inventory. In fact, several issues related to phonological and phonetic development in secondlanguage learning remain unclear for lack of a sufficient body of data. Two perennial questions have been: the importance of the age of onset of learning and the interaction between age and degree of exposure to the second language. These questions have been scarcely touched in scientifically conducted investigations (Asher & Garcia, 1969; Oyama, 1976;Streeter & Landauer, 1976). Studies which have been carried out have focused primarily on competence in speech production, leaving out important issues related to the perception of the second language.The purpose of this set of experiments was to

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Section: Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The modification of speech perception and production in second-language learning

Williams

1979

Perception & Psychophysics

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“…Provocative early findings in infant speech perception indicated that mechanisms responsible for patterns of voicing perception are functional at a very early age ͑Eimas et al., 1971;Trehub and Rabinovich, 1972͒. Moreover, experience appears to play a relatively minor role in shaping voicing discrimination early in development ͑Lasky et al, 1975;Streeter, 1976͒. Lasky et al ͑1975͒, for example, found that infants from a Spanish-speaking environment discriminate differences in VOT if stimuli straddle either the Spanish ͑lead versus short-lag͒ or the English ͑short-lag versus longlag͒ VOT boundary but show little evidence of discrimination otherwise.…”

Section: A Auditory Discontinuities In Temporal Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory discontinuities interact with categorization: Implications for speech perception

Holt

Lotto

Diehl

2004

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Behavioral experiments with infants, adults, and nonhuman animals converge with neurophysiological findings to suggest that there is a discontinuity in auditory processing of stimulus components differing in onset time by about 20 ms. This discontinuity has been implicated as a basis for boundaries between speech categories distinguished by voice onset time ͑VOT͒. Here, it is investigated how this discontinuity interacts with the learning of novel perceptual categories. Adult listeners were trained to categorize nonspeech stimuli that mimicked certain temporal properties of VOT stimuli. One group of listeners learned categories with a boundary coincident with the perceptual discontinuity. Another group learned categories defined such that the perceptual discontinuity fell within a category. Listeners in the latter group required significantly more experience to reach criterion categorization performance. Evidence of interactions between the perceptual discontinuity and the learned categories extended to generalization tests as well. It has been hypothesized that languages make use of perceptual discontinuities to promote distinctiveness among sounds within a language inventory. The present data suggest that discontinuities interact with category learning. As such, ''learnability'' may play a predictive role in selection of language sound inventories.

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“…For example, as we indicated earlier in the paper, infant speech perception research suggested that a change in memory for phonetic information occurs sometime after 2 months. Infants as young as 1 month can detect a contrast in place of articulation (e.g., /b/ vs. /d/), or in voice onset time (e.g., /p/ vs. fbi), for a variety of consonants, as long as the syllables are presented at a rapid rate (short lSI) of 1 or Usec (e.g., Cutting & Eimas, 1975;Eimas, Siqueland, Juszcyk, & Vigorito, 1971;Trehub & Rabinovitch, 1972). Infants this young, however, apparently fail at detecting the same phonetic contrasts if the ISIs are lengthened, so that short-term retention of stimulus properties is required.…”

Section: Early Age Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of infant ear asymmetries for speech and music

Best

Hoffman

Glanville

1982

Perception & Psychophysics

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Groups of 2-, 3-, and 4-month olds were tested for dichotic ear differences in memory-based phonetic and music timbre discriminations. A right-ear advantage for speech and a left-ear advantage (LEA) for music were found in the 3-and 4-month-olds. However, the 2-month-olds showed only the music LEA, with no reliable evidence of memory-based speech discrimination by either hemisphere. Thus, the responses of all groups to speech contrasts were different from those to music contrasts, but the pattern of the response dichotomy in the youngest group deviated from that found in the older infants. It is suggested that the quality or use of lefthemisphere phonetic memory may change between 2 and 3 months, and that the engagement of right-hemisphere specialized memory for musical timbre may precede that for left-hemisphere phonetic memory. Several directions for future research are suggested to determine whether infant short-term memory asymmetries for speech and music are attributable to acoustic factors, to different modes or strategies in perception, or to structural and dynamic properties of natural sound sources.The existence of a neurobiological dichotomy in human auditory perception, which distinguishes at least some qualities of spoken language from most nonlinguistic auditory events, is strongly implied by the pattern and incidence of functional cerebral asymmetries in adults, particularly as revealed through dichotic ear advantages (e.g.,

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Auditory-linguistic sensitivity in early infancy.

Cited by 95 publications

References 8 publications

The modification of speech perception and production in second-language learning

The modification of speech perception and production in second-language learning

Auditory discontinuities interact with categorization: Implications for speech perception

Development of infant ear asymmetries for speech and music

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