Native-language recognition abilities in 4-month-old infants from monolingual and bilingual environments

Bosch, Laura; Sebastián‐Gallés, Núria

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(97)00040-1

Cited by 289 publications

(279 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés (1997) also showed that Spanish/Catalan discrimination was possible in four-month-olds, but rhythm was not thought to be the critical cue. 2 This relies on the assumption that the syllable inventory of a language always starts with the most simple syllables (with the exception of V which is not legal in all languages).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal

1999

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Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants' capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal

1999

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“…However, a single language milieu is still the standard model for investigating language acquisition even though a great proportion of children are raised with more than 1 language (2). Whereas infants who have to acquire 2 languages simultaneously face an important challenge, they pass language production milestones at an age similar to monolinguals (3), and display minor differences in language processing (4,5). The present study investigates the mechanisms that bilingual infants might employ to deal efficiently with a linguistic signal coming from 2 languages.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, neonates can discriminate utterances from 2 languages of different rhythmic classes (6)(7)(8). Two-to four-month-olds learn to distinguish languages belonging to the same rhythmic class (4,9). Later on, in the second half of their first year, infants show exposure-dependent changes in phonetic discrimination (10,11).…”

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confidence: 99%

Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants

Kovács

Mehler

2009

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

526

481

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Children exposed to bilingual input typically learn 2 languages without obvious difficulties. However, it is unclear how preverbal infants cope with the inconsistent input and how bilingualism affects early development. In 3 eye-tracking studies we show that 7-month-old infants, raised with 2 languages from birth, display improved cognitive control abilities compared with matched monolinguals. Whereas both monolinguals and bilinguals learned to respond to a speech or visual cue to anticipate a reward on one side of a screen, only bilinguals succeeded in redirecting their anticipatory looks when the cue began signaling the reward on the opposite side. Bilingual infants rapidly suppressed their looks to the first location and learned the new response. These findings show that processing representations from 2 languages leads to a domain-general enhancement of the cognitive control system well before the onset of speech.cognitive development ͉ early bilingualism ͉ executive functions ͉ eyetracking ͉ infant cognition ''

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“…There are experiments indicating that our ability to recognise speech sounds in infancy is very wide. However, it narrows in the course of our human development (Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés 1997;Kuhl 2000;Palmer et al 2012). Monolingual infants who are up to six months old are able to recognise the speech sounds of all languages equally well, but between the sixth and twelfth months of age, these competences change as babies gain new experience.…”

Section: Looking At Ore From a Broader Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural neuroscience and the category of race: the case of the other-race effect

Malinowska

2016

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The use of the category of race in science (in relation to humans) remains controversial. During the last few years there has been a lively debate on this topic in the field of a relatively young neuroscience discipline called cultural neuroscience. The main focus of cultural neuroscience is on biocultural conditions of the development of different dimensions of human perceptive activity, both cognitive or emotional. These dimensions are analysed through the comparison of representatives of different social and ethnic groups. In my article, I present arguments supporting these two hypotheses:(1) the other-race effect understood as an individual, distinct effect does not exist. It is rather an exemplification of a much broader phenomenon which I call the unfamiliarity homogeneity effect. It includes not only problems with differentiation and recognition of faces of representatives of other ethnic groups, but also covers similar recognitional difficulties (e.g. recognition of members of other-social groups, other languages or even certain sounds and objects); (2) The race-based terminology and categories are used in cultural neuroscience research in a vague and inconsistent manner. Such an approach distorts the science both in empirically and conceptually significant respects. The unfamiliarity homogeneity effect is an example of such a situation: narrowing it to the other-race effect makes it difficult to analyse in a wider context crucial for its understanding.

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Native-language recognition abilities in 4-month-old infants from monolingual and bilingual environments

Cited by 289 publications

References 41 publications

Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal

Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal

Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants

Cultural neuroscience and the category of race: the case of the other-race effect

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