The quest for generalizations over consonants: Asymmetries between consonants and vowels are not the by-product of acoustic differences

Toro, Juan M.; Shukla, Mohinish; Nespor, Marina; Endress, Ansgar D.

doi:10.3758/pp.70.8.1515

Cited by 40 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Therefore, the activations observed in the present study suggest that vowel information is privileged in newborns' encoding and/or recognition of word-sounds. These data contrast with previous studies in adults and older infants, showing that participants rely primarily on consonants during lexical processing and word learning (15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23).…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

“…Different studies suggest that in adults (15)(16)(17)(18), and in infants older than 12 mo (19)(20)(21)(22)(23), consonantal sequences are encoded more robustly than vocalic sequences for the representation of words. It is possible that a similar bias (namely, preference for consonantal information when encoding words) is already present at birth.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…[Auditory sensory representations decay in about 1.5 s in newborns (46).] The contrast between the brain responses to consonant and vowel changes enables a comparison of early word-sound memories to more mature word-representations that are known to rely mainly on consonantal information (15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23). In addition, the present study investigates whether brain areas that support memory for verbal information in adults also support memory in newborn infants.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories

Benavides-Varela

Hochmann

Montorsi

et al. 2012

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

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Recent research has shown that specific areas of the human brain are activated by speech from the time of birth. However, it is currently unknown whether newborns' brains also encode and remember the sounds of words when processing speech. The present study investigates the type of information that newborns retain when they hear words and the brain structures that support word-sound recognition. Forty-four healthy newborns were tested with the functional near-infrared spectroscopy method to establish their ability to memorize the sound of a word and distinguish it from a phonetically similar one, 2 min after encoding. Right frontal regions-comparable to those activated in adults during retrieval of verbal materialshowed a characteristic neural signature of recognition when newborns listened to a test word that had the same vowel of a previously heard word. In contrast, a characteristic novelty response was found when a test word had different vowels than the familiar word, despite having the same consonants. These results indicate that the information carried by vowels is better recognized by newborns than the information carried by consonants. Moreover, these data suggest that right frontal areas may support the recognition of speech sequences from the very first stages of language acquisition.neonate's memory | right frontal lobe | sound encoding | speech perception | oxyhemoglobin P revious studies have shown that newborns and human fetuses are able to remember word sounds (1-3) as well as to extract prosodic properties of speech (4) or identity relations between syllables (5, 6). However, neither the specific elements newborns encode from speech, nor the brain structures that mediate speech recognition at birth have been precisely characterized. Building on a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) paradigm used to test memory in newborns (7), the present study asks whether the newborn can remember all of the sounds [consonants (C) and vowels (V)] that form a bisyllabic CVCV word, or whether some of these segments are better encoded than others.Judging by the number of studies reporting early abilities to discriminate fine phonetic contrasts (8), one might be inclined to ascribe to newborns a very detailed representation of the sound of words. In fact, newborns appear to discriminate all phonetic contrasts of the languages of the world, including those that their parents can no longer distinguish. Newborns distinguish consonants differing in one feature-for example, place of articulation, voicing, manner of articulation (9-11), duration (12)-as well as vowel quality contrasts (13,14). Do the representations newborns hold in memory contain the full range of segmental details suggested by these discrimination capacities?Different studies suggest that in adults (15-18), and in infants older than 12 mo (19-23), consonantal sequences are encoded more robustly than vocalic sequences for the representation of words. It is possible that a similar bias (namely, preference for consonantal information when encodi...

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories

Benavides-Varela

Hochmann

Montorsi

et al. 2012

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

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“…Adults' primary use of consonants is consistent with the role that consonants have been proposed to play in lexical processing, as compared with the role of vowels in indexical, prosodic, and grammatical processing (Bonatti et al, 2005;Nespor et al, 2003). Specifically, consonants and vowels are processed differently; adults extract statistical regularities from consonants but not from vowels (Bonatti et al, 2005;Toro, Shukla, Nespor, & Endress, 2008; but see Newport & Aslin, 2004), whereas rule extraction is privileged over vowels but not over consonants for adults and infants (Bonatti et al, 2005;Hochmann, Benavides-Varela, Nespor, & Mehler, 2011;Pons & Toro, 2010;Toro et al, 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Sound symbolism in infancy: Evidence for sound–shape cross-modal correspondences in 4-month-olds

Öztürk

Krehm

Vouloumanos

2013

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

237

222

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“…It has been argued that whereas vowels are more perceptually salient, with higher mean energy content, consonants are more important in word identification ͑Bonatti et al, 2005;Toro et al, 2008͒. If that is the case, then it is also possible that detection and 3AFC-ID could be performed based on acoustically salient vowel information, whereas open-ID relies more on consonants. This possibility gets some support from the finding that across tokens, identification of vowels in speech-shaped noise is better than that for consonants, though there is wide variability across the different types of consonants ͑Phatak and Allen, 2007͒.…”

Section: The Role Of Frequency Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Masking release for words in amplitude-modulated noise as a function of modulation rate and task

Buss

Grose

et al. 2009

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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For normal-hearing listeners, masked speech recognition can improve with the introduction of masker amplitude modulation. The present experiments tested the hypothesis that this masking release is due in part to an interaction between the temporal distribution of cues necessary to perform the task and the probability of those cues temporally coinciding with masker modulation minima. Stimuli were monosyllabic words masked by speech-shaped noise, and masker modulation was introduced via multiplication with a raised sinusoid of 2.5-40 Hz. Tasks included detection, three-alternative forced-choice identification, and open-set identification. Overall, there was more masking release associated with the closed than the open-set tasks. The best rate of modulation also differed as a function of task; whereas low modulation rates were associated with best performance for the detection and three-alternative identification tasks, performance improved with modulation rate in the open-set task. This task-by-rate interaction was also observed when amplitude-modulated speech was presented in a steady masker, and for low-and high-pass filtered speech presented in modulated noise. These results were interpreted as showing that the optimal rate of amplitude modulation depends on the temporal distribution of speech cues and the information required to perform a particular task.

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The quest for generalizations over consonants: Asymmetries between consonants and vowels are not the by-product of acoustic differences

Cited by 40 publications

References 44 publications

Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories

Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories

Sound symbolism in infancy: Evidence for sound–shape cross-modal correspondences in 4-month-olds

Masking release for words in amplitude-modulated noise as a function of modulation rate and task

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