Early recognition of familiar word-forms as a function of production skills

Abstract

Growing evidence shows that early speech processing relies on information extracted from speech production. In particular, production skills are linked to word-form processing, as more advanced producers prefer listening to pseudowords containing consonants they do not yet produce. However, it is unclear whether production affects word-form encoding (the translation of perceived phonological information into a memory trace) and/or recognition (the automatic retrieval of a stored item). Distinguishing recognition from encoding makes it possible to explore whether sensorimotor information is stored in long-term phonological representations (and thus, retrieved during recognition) or is processed when encoding a new item, but not necessarily when retrieving a stored item. In this study, we asked whether speech-related sensorimotor information is retained in long-term representations of word-forms. To this aim, we tested the effect of production on the recognition of ecologically learned, real familiar word-forms. Testing these items allowed to assess the effect of sensorimotor information in a context in which encoding did not happen during testing itself. Two groups of French-learning monolinguals (11- and 14-month-olds) participated in the study. Using the Headturn Preference Procedure, each group heard two lists, each containing 10 familiar word-forms composed of either early-learned consonants (commonly produced by French-learners at these ages) or late-learned consonants (more rarely produced at these ages). We hypothesized differences in listening preferences as a function of word-list and/or production skills. At both 11 and 14 months, babbling skills modulated orientation times to the word-lists containing late-learned consonants. This specific effect establishes that speech production impacts familiar word-form recognition by 11 months, suggesting that sensorimotor information is retained in long-term word-form representations and accessed during word-form processing.

Infants’ sensitivity to phonotactic regularities related to perceptually low-salient fricatives: a cross-linguistic study

“…Given studies showing that infants’ ability to produce consonants impacts their processing of speech between 9 to 11 months ( DePaolis et al, 2011 , 2013 ; Majorano et al, 2014 ), our perceptual preference for /s/ over /ʃ/ could relate to its production advantage. Note, however, that recent evidence from French-learning infants reports no production of /s/ or /ʃ/ in 32 11-month-olds, and only 1 infant producing /s/ and 1 producing /ʃ/ out of 32 14-month-olds ( Lorenzini and Nazzi, 2022 ), so it is not clear that production of /s/ is favored at this developmental stage, and could have impacted their performance. One direct way to explore this possibility would have been to ask the caregivers about their infant’s babbling repertoire, and assess whether their production abilities are associated with their perceptual preferences in the current study.…”

“…However, little is currently known about the factors modulating acquisition, as most previous studies investigating infants’ sensitivity to phonotactic regularities used many different regularities in each phonotactic condition (e.g., 8 different legal versus 8 different illegal CCs embedded in 224 different nonwords; Sebastián-Gallés and Bosch, 2002 ) rather than focusing on specific phonotactic contrasts (but see, e.g., Gonzalez-Gomez and Nazzi, 2015 ). Furthermore, in most studies, phonotactic regularities between conditions usually differ by more than one phoneme (e.g., /rt./versus/pf/) with at least one perceptually salient phoneme contrast, involving early acquired phonemes that infants can produce early in life (i.e., at the babbling stage): vowels, plosives, and nasals ( de Boysson-Bardies, 1996 ; Morgan and Wren, 2018 ; Lorenzini and Nazzi, 2022 ). Accordingly, there are important gaps in our knowledge of the specific types of phonotactic regularities acquired in infancy.…”