Infants' sensitivity to vowel and tonal contrasts.

Trehub, Sandra E.

doi:10.1037/h0034999

Cited by 134 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(21 reference statements)

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“…Obler (1982) took a similar position in proposing a dual system for bilingual speech production and a unitary one for perception. Yet this position appears somewhat inconsistent with other findings that, for both Ll and nonnative stimuli, perception can precede production (Aslin, Pisoni, Hennessey, & Perey, 1981;Eimas & Miller, 1980;Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971;Flege & Eefting, 1987b;Menyuk, 1977;Smith, 1973;Trehub, 1973Trehub, , 1976Werker & Tees, 1984).…”

Section: Perception Versus Productioncontrasting

confidence: 46%

Consonant and vowel perception and production: Early English-French bilinguals and English monolinguals

Mack

1989

Perception & Psychophysics

105

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This study is a comparative analysis of the English phonetic systems of 10 fluent adult EnglishFrench bilinguals who acquired their two languages prior to age 8 and who were English-dominant, and of 10 adult English monolinguals. The objective of the study was to determine whether or not early English-dominant bilinguals perceive and produce speech as English monolinguals do. Discrimination and identification tests of synthetic Id-tl and Ii-II continua and speech production tests revealed that the bilinguals' discrimination and production of Id/ and It! and their production of /II did not differ significantly from the monolinguals'. However, the bilinguals' identification of Id-tl and Ii-II and one aspect of their production of Iii did differ significantly from that ofthe monolinguals. The present results indicate that early bilingualism can yield monolinguallike performance in at least one of the bilinguals' languages, but only with respect to certain aspects of the phonetic system. These findings are viewed in light of sound-class distinctions, the perception-production dichotomy, and bilingual phonetic transfer and restructuring.An abiding concern in bilingual research is whether or not individuals who acquire two languages in early childhood possess phonetic systems like those of monolingual speakers. One view is that such individuals (commonly referred to as "early bilinguals") are capable of acquiring complete control of a second-language phonetic system (Lenneberg, 1967;Penfield, 1953;Penfield & Roberts, 1959;Seliger, 1978) and, indeed, that they may be entirely monolingual-like in both of their languages (Baetens Beardsmore, 1986). An opposing view is that early bilinguals experience no particular phonological advantage and, in some respects, may be at a disadvantage compared to late (adolescent or adult) bilinguals (Ekstrand, 1976;Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle, 1977, 1978. A position intermediate to these is that, although early bilinguals are more likely than late bilinguals to perceive and/or produce their languages in a monolingual-like manner (Asher & Garcia, 1969;Fathman, 1975;Larew, 1961;Oyama, 1976Oyama, ,1982Seliger, Krashen, & Ladefoged, 1975; Tabta, Wood, & Loewenthal, 1981a, 1981b, they still may not function exactly as monolinguals do. For example, in a recent study of Spanish-English bilinguals, Flege and I wish to thank Sheila Blumstein for her ever-helpful advice on and support of this project, Philip Lieberman and Michel Paradis for their indespensable counsel, and John Mertus for his speech programs and valuable assistance. Sincere thanks are also extended to James E. Flege for his insightful comments on an earlier draft and to the editor and reviewers for their pertinent and appreciated comments and suggestions. Any errors or omissions remaining are the responsibility of the author. Portions of this project were funded by a Helen Swallow Richards Endowed Fellowship from the American Association of University Women. Correspondence may be addressed to Molly Mack, Division of English as an Inte...

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Section: Perception Versus Productioncontrasting

confidence: 46%

Consonant and vowel perception and production: Early English-French bilinguals and English monolinguals

Mack

1989

Perception & Psychophysics

105

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“…All of the behavior the animals demonstrated in the tests followed from their natural tendency to respond with different rates to the call models. Thus, the natural discrimination of communication sound models in mice on the basis of their formant structure is comparable to the unconditioned vowel discrimination in 4-to 17-week-old human infants (32).…”

Section: Ranking Of Call Modelsmentioning

confidence: 73%

Mice and humans perceive multiharmonic communication sounds in the same way

Ehret

Riecke

2001

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Vowels and voiced consonants of human speech and most mammalian vocalizations consist of harmonically structured sounds. The frequency contours of formants in the sounds determine their spectral shape and timbre and carry, in human speech, important phonetic and prosodic information to be communicated. Steadystate partitions of vowels are discriminated and identified mainly on the basis of harmonics or formants having been resolved by the critical-band filters of the auditory system and then grouped together. Speech-analog processing and perception of vowel-like communication sounds in mammalian vocal repertoires has not been demonstrated so far. Here, we synthesize 11 call models and a tape loop with natural wriggling calls of mouse pups and show that house mice perceive this communication call in the same way as we perceive speech vowels: they need the presence of a minimum number of formants (three formants-in this case, at 3.8 ؉ 7.6 ؉ 11.4 kHz), they resolve formants by the critical-band mechanism, group formants together for call identification, perceive the formant structure rather continuously, may detect the missing fundamental of a harmonic complex, and all of these occur in a natural communication situation without any training or behavioral constraints. Thus, wriggling-call perception in mice is comparable with unconditioned vowel discrimination and perception in prelinguistic human infants and points to evolutionary old rules of handling speech sounds in the human auditory system up to the perceptual level.auditory perception ͉ evolution of speech perception ͉ formant filtering and grouping ͉ mouse ͉ sound communication M ouse pups produce so-called wriggling calls when struggling in the nest, mainly when pushing for the teats during suckling by the mother (1). These calls release three types of maternal behavior: namely, licking of pups, changes of suckling position, and nest building, and thus show that they are important communication sounds (2). Wriggling calls usually consist of a fundamental frequency near 4 kHz and several (a minimum of two) overtones reaching to a maximum frequency of about 20 kHz, if overtones within a 30-dB range are considered (Fig. 1). This basic harmonic structure may be modified by frequency modulations of the harmonics and rapid amplitude modulations leading to side bands of the harmonics or to rather noisy partitions of the calls (Fig. 1).Mouse calls are structurally similar to vocalizations of many mammals (3), including cries and other nonverbal sounds of humans, especially infants (4). Because little is known about the perception of these types of vocalizations, we will compare the perceptual properties of wriggling calls with the perception of vowels of human speech that also have a frequency structure similar to that of wriggling calls of mice (5, 6). We hypothesize that mice perceive the wriggling calls in the frequency domain by following the same rules as humans in analyzing, identifying, and grouping formants together to a vowel percept (7-9). The term ''form...

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“…During the first half-year, NH infants are able to detect and discriminate fine-grained differences in speech sounds that differentiate words in any of the world's languages. Numerous investigations have shown that young infants are able to discriminate vowels [10][11][12] and consonants that differ with respect to voicing [13], place [14][15][16], and manner [17,18] of articulation. Moreover, up to about 8 months of age, infants are able to detect and discriminate many phonetic contrasts that are not phonologically relevant in the ambient language but are relevant in other languages [11,[19][20][21][22] (see [8] for a review).…”

Section: Speech Discriminationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech perception skills of deaf infants following cochlear implantation: a first report

Houston

Pisoni

Kirk

et al. 2003

International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

104

116

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SummaryObjective-We adapted a behavioral procedure that has been used extensively with normalhearing (NH) infants, the visual habituation (VH) procedure, to assess deaf infants' discrimination and attention to speech.Methods-Twenty-four NH 6-month-olds, 24 NH 9-month-olds, and 16 deaf infants at various ages before and following cochlear implantation (CI) were tested in a sound booth on their caregiver's lap in front of a TV monitor. During the habituation phase, each infant was presented with a repeating speech sound (e.g. 'hop hop hop') paired with a visual display of a checkerboard pattern on half of the trials ('sound trials') and only the visual display on the other half ('silent trials'). When the infant's looking time decreased and reached a habituation criterion, a test phase began. This consisted of two trials: an 'old trial' that was identical to the 'sound trials' and a 'novel trial' that consisted of a different repeating speech sound (e.g. 'ahhh') paired with the same checkerboard pattern.Results-During the habituation phase, NH infants looked significantly longer during the sound trials than during the silent trials. However, deaf infants who had received cochlear implants (CIs) displayed a much weaker preference for the sound trials. On the other hand, both NH infants and deaf infants with CIs attended significantly longer to the visual display during the novel trial than during the old trial, suggesting that they were able to discriminate the speech patterns. Before receiving CIs, deaf infants did not show any preferences.Conclusions-Taken together, the findings suggest that deaf infants who receive CIs are able to detect and discriminate some speech patterns. However, their overall attention to speech sounds may be less than NH infants'. Attention to speech may impact other aspects of speech perception and spoken language development, such as segmenting words from fluent speech and learning novel words. Implications of the effects of early auditory deprivation and age at CI on speech perception and language development are discussed.

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Infants' sensitivity to vowel and tonal contrasts.

Cited by 134 publications

References 17 publications

Consonant and vowel perception and production: Early English-French bilinguals and English monolinguals

Consonant and vowel perception and production: Early English-French bilinguals and English monolinguals

Mice and humans perceive multiharmonic communication sounds in the same way

Speech perception skills of deaf infants following cochlear implantation: a first report

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