Infant Perception of Non-Native Consonant Contrasts that Adults Assimilate in Different Ways

Best, Catherine; McRoberts, Gerald W.

doi:10.1177/00238309030460020701

Cited by 178 publications

(189 citation statements)

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“…Surprisingly, there are very few such data, and some of the data have been collected to examine perception of non-native sounds by children and adults outside the region. Best and McRoberts (2003) found that English-exposed infants and adults were able to distinguish Zulu clicks, but that adults were not able to distinguish non-native nonclick sounds, and concluded that the clicks are so different from native English phonemes that they are not assimilated to English phonemes (while the other nonnative phonemes are assimilated), so that as infants and children grow older they do not lose the ability to distinguish the clicks.…”

Section: Acquisition Of Clicksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Alcock

Alibhai

2013

Neuropsychology of Children in Africa

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Section: Acquisition Of Clicksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Alcock

Alibhai

2013

Neuropsychology of Children in Africa

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“…The transition from an early universal phonetic ability to language specific phonetic perception occurs between 6 and 12 mo of age, when nonnative phonetic perception declines (Werker and Tees 1984;Best and McRoberts 2003;Rivera-Gaxiola et al 2005b;Tsao et al 2006) and there is increased sophistication in the processing of native speech (Kuhl et al 1992). Work in my laboratory showed that at the same time that nonnative perception for consonants declines, native-language speech perception shows a significant increase.…”

Section: The Timing Of Infant Learningmentioning

confidence: 87%

Early Language Learning and the Social Brain

Kuhl

2014

Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol

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Explaining how every typically developing child acquires language is one of the grand challenges of cognitive neuroscience. Historically, language learning provoked classic debates about the contributions of innately specialized as opposed to general learning mechanisms. Now, new data are being brought to bear from studies that employ magnetoencephalograph (MEG), electroencephalograph (EEG), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies on young children. These studies examine the patterns of association between brain and behavioral measures. The resulting data offer both expected results and surprises that are altering theory. As we uncover what it means to be human through the lens of young children, and their ability to speak, what we learn will not only inform theories of human development, but also lead to the discovery of neural biomarkers, early in life, that indicate risk for language impairment and allow early intervention for children with developmental disabilities involving language.The earliest phases of language acquisition invoke a special fascination because they allow us to examine humans' extraordinary abilities to acquire what is arguably our most unique skill-the ability to speak. Humans' capacity for language provoked classic debates on nature versus nurture by equally strong proponents of nativism (Chomsky 1959) and learning (Skinner 1957). Although we are far beyond those debates and now informed by a great deal of data about infants, their innate predispositions, and their incredible abilities to learn once exposed to natural language (Saffran et al. 2006;Kuhl 2010Kuhl , 2011, we are only beginning to posit the mechanisms in the brain and mind of a child that enable language acquisition (e.g., Kuhl et al. 2014).In this paper, I advance a new hypothesis-that in the earliest phases of language acquisition, infants combine a powerful set of domain-general computational skills with their equally extraordinary social skills to "crack" the speech code. Furthermore, I hypothesize that the social brain-in ways we have yet to understand-"gates" the computational mechanisms underlying learning in the domain of language. My goal here isto discuss recent results that advance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the social influences on language learning in infants.The assertion that social factors gate language learning, I argue, explains not only how typically developing children acquire language, but also why children with autism exhibit twin deficits in social cognition and language, and why nonhuman animals with impressive computational abilities do not acquire language. Moreover, the gating hypothesis may explain why social factors play a far more significant role than previously realized in human learning beyond language and throughout our lifetimes (Meltzoff et al. 2009).Using methods of systems neuroscience tailored for use with very young children, we can now explore how the integration of information across specialized brain systems such as language ...

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“…Infants' speech perception skills show a dual change toward the end of the first year of life ( Figure 1). Not only does nonnative speech perception decline (Best and McRoberts 2003;Werker and Tees 1984), but, also, native-language speech perception skills show improvement, reflecting a facilitative effect of experience with native language Tsao, Liu, and Kuhl 2006). The mechanism underlying change during this sensitive period in development, and the relationship between the change in native and nonnative speech perception, is of theoretical interest.…”

Section: Early Phonetic Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of enriched auditory experience on infants’ speech perception during the first year of life

Zhao

Kuhl

2016

Prospects

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Infants rapidly learn language in their home environments. Between 6 and 12 months of age, infants' ability to process the building blocks of speech (i.e., phonetic information) develops quickly, and this ability predicts later language development. Typically, developing infants in a monolingual language environment rapidly tune in to the phonetic information of their native language, while their sensitivity to nonnative phonetic information starts to decrease. Yet, enriched experience to a new language during this time significantly improves infants' sensitivity to the sound contrasts used in that language when compared to a control group without exposure to the new language. More recently, a new study examined another type of enriched auditory experience-musical experience-to determine its effect not only on music processing but also on phonetic processing. Results showed that a 1-month laboratory music intervention focusing on rhythm learning enhanced 9-month-old infants' neural processing not only for music but also for speech. Together, these results suggest that these enriched auditory experiences in infancy may improve infants' general auditory pattern-detection skills and their sensitivity to phonetic information.Keywords Infants Á Speech perception Á Language experience Á Music intervention Á Learning In many species, the young are particularly sensitive to environmental inputs at certain periods during development. The barn owl's ability to localize prey is calibrated by auditory-visual input during an early sensitive period in development; wearing prisms (or Prospects ( ) 46:235-247 DOI 10.1007 ear plugs) alters the mapping during this period (Knudsen 2002). Binocular fusion is dependent on binocular visual input during a critical period early in development; rearing cats with one occluded eye irreversibly alters binocular representation in the visual centers of the cortex (Hubel and Wiesel 1977;Shatz and Stryker 1978). In songbirds, learning their species-typical song depends on experience during a critical temporal window; presentation of conspecific song during that time is essential for normal development (Konishi 1985;Marler 1970). A recent theoretical paper (Werker and Hensch 2015) discusses the nature of the ''critical'' periods, especially the biological factors that ''open'' and ''close'' them. Here, we review work from our laboratory that focuses on one specific time period for human infants' learning; namely, the ''sensitive period'' for phonetic learning and the experiential factors that may influence this learning process. We first discuss the developmental trajectory of infants' abilities to discriminate native and nonnative phonetic contrasts between 6 and 12 months of age, and then several experiential factors we have observed in laboratory studies that influence infants' ability to discriminate speech sounds during this sensitive period. Lastly, we discuss future directions for research that will help elucidate the mechanisms through which these experiential factors exert t...

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Infant Perception of Non-Native Consonant Contrasts that Adults Assimilate in Different Ways

Cited by 178 publications

References 76 publications

Language Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Language Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Early Language Learning and the Social Brain

Effects of enriched auditory experience on infants’ speech perception during the first year of life

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