Development of perceptual sensitivity to extrinsic vowel duration in infants learning American English

Ko, Eon-Suk; Söderström, Mélanie; Morgan, James L.

doi:10.1121/1.3239465

Cited by 16 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Several studies have proposed that hyperarticulation helps acquisition of phonological categories by delivering information about the sound system of the native language in an exaggerated form (Kuhl et al, 1997;Werker et al, 2007). However, as noted in Soderstrom (2007), there is difficulty in applying this hypothesis to the exaggerated VOT in Malsheen (1980) because, by 15 months, children have already developed elaborate phonological representation of voice and voiceless features (White and Morgan, 2008;Ko et al, 2009). The exaggerated VOT in Malsheen (1980) is, thus, not likely to be driven by an effort to facilitate the phonological learning of children at the early speech stage.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Nonlinear development of speaking rate in child-directed speech

Ko¹

2012

Lingua

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Nonlinear development of speaking rate in child-directed speech

Ko¹

2012

Lingua

Self Cite

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“…In other words, the absence of a difference found here cannot be interpreted as evidence of absence of a weighting bias. Secondly, it remains an open question whether infants, like adults, perceptually integrate co-occurring cue values to the point that discrimination of tokens containing conflicting cues is markedly worse than stimuli containing correlated cues (but, as mentioned, Ko et al, 2009 document that by 14 months infants prefer stimuli containing cues that are correlated in the ambient language). Finally, as summarized above, multidimensional categories appear to be harder for adults than unidimensional ones in speech.…”

Section: 0 General Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Neither of these lines of research demonstrates developmental or experiential changes, so they do not bear on how infants learn multi-cue contrasts. A recent study provides the first piece of evidence to this effect: Ko, Soderstrom, and Morgan (2009) document that 14-, but not 8-, month-olds prefer to listen to trials with where long vowels are followed by voiced stops and short vowels by voiceless stops, over trials with long vowels followed by voiceless stops and short ones by voiced stops. Thus, it appears that the learning of the co-occurrence of acoustic correlates (here, extrinsic vowel length-stop voicing) takes place around the end of the first year of life.…”

Section: 0 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Effects of the distribution of acoustic cues on infants' perception of sibilants

Cristià

McGuire

Seidl

et al. 2011

Journal of Phonetics

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a b s t r a c tA current theoretical view proposes that infants converge on the speech categories of their native language by attending to frequency distributions that occur in the acoustic input. To date, the only empirical support for this statistical learning hypothesis comes from studies where a single, salient dimension was manipulated. Additional evidence is sought here, by introducing a less salient pair of categories supported by multiple cues. We exposed English-learning infants to a multi-cue bidimensional grid ranging between retroflex and alveolopalatal sibilants in prevocalic position. This contrast is substantially more difficult according to previous cross-linguistic and perceptual research, and its perception is driven by cues in both the consonantal and the following vowel portions. Infants heard one of two distributions (flat, or with two peaks), and were tested with sounds varying along only one dimension. Infants' responses differed depending on the familiarization distribution, and their performance was equally good for the vocalic and the frication dimension, lending some support to the statistical hypothesis even in this harder learning situation. However, learning was restricted to the retroflex category, and a control experiment showed that lack of learning for the alveolopalatal category was not due to the presence of a competing category. Thus, these results contribute fundamental evidence on the extent and limitations of the statistical hypothesis as an explanation for infants' perceptual tuning.

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“…Our results for this pair are in the same direction, but this asymmetry was not consistently observed across all long/short vowel pairs. Lengthening might show weaker effects because it is available in the language for prosodic effects such as application of emphatic stress (Ko et al, 2009). If short vowels are lengthened more often than long vowels are shortened, a perceptual asymmetry could result.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dutch and English listeners’ interpretation of vowel duration

Feest¹,

Swingley²

2011

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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The relationship between native allophonic experience with vowel duration and perception of the English tense/ lax vowel contrast by Spanish and Russian listeners The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 124, 3959 (2008) 1. Introduction Vowel duration depends on speaking rate, stress, and utterance position, among other factors (Klatt, 1976). In some languages, such as Japanese, vowel duration is described as contrastive: Several pairs of vowels are distinguished from one another almost entirely by duration. In other languages, such as Spanish, phonological vowel distinctions are not signaled by duration. Dutch and English, the languages we examine here, are less clear cases. In phonological descriptions Dutch is considered to maintain a featural vowel duration contrast, principally because of the rules that depend upon it: For example, the diminutive suffix takes a different form after a short (-etje than after a long-vowel syllable (-tje;Moulton, 1962;Booij, 1995). Also, Dutch orthography, in contrast to English, clearly marks durational oppositions, as in maan ("moon") and man ("man"), rules that are very familiar to literate Dutch adults. Finally, Dutch unlike English speakers have been reported to be reluctant to exaggerate the duration of short vowels to convey emphasis in child-directed speech (Dietrich et al., 2007). In most dialects of English vowel duration is not considered contrastive, though vowels vary in their "intrinsic" durations (House, 1961;Chomsky and Halle, 1968;Hillenbrand et al., 2000) and duration varies depending on context, as will be discussed in more detail below. However, from a phonetic viewpoint, English and Dutch are alike in their opposition of pairs of long (tense) and short (lax) vowels, in which members of a pair differ (prototypically) in both quantity and quality. As a result, it is not clear whether the differential phonological descriptions of Dutch as maintaining a durational contrast and English as not doing so have a basis in native listeners' cue weighting. Here, we examined native-speaker identification of English and Dutch monosyllabic words varying in their vowel duration. Our goal was to determine whether Dutch listeners would use vowel duration to a greater degree than English listeners. In English, coda voicing may affect vowel duration more strongly than the tense/lax distinction does (Denes, 1955). Hillenbrand et al. (1995) reported an average

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Development of perceptual sensitivity to extrinsic vowel duration in infants learning American English

Cited by 16 publications

References 18 publications

Nonlinear development of speaking rate in child-directed speech

Nonlinear development of speaking rate in child-directed speech

Effects of the distribution of acoustic cues on infants' perception of sibilants

Dutch and English listeners’ interpretation of vowel duration

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