Transfer of sensorimotor learning reveals phoneme representations in preliterate children

Abstract

Reading acquisition is strongly intertwined with phoneme awareness that relies on implicit phoneme representations. We asked whether phoneme representations emerge before literacy. We recruited two groups of children, 4 to 5-year-old preschoolers (N=29) and 7 to 8year-old schoolchildren (N=24), whose phonological awareness was evaluated, and one adult control group (N=17). We altered speakers' auditory feedback in real time to elicit persisting pronunciation changes, referred to as auditory-motor adaptation or learning. Assessing the transfer of learning at phoneme level enabled us to investigate the developmental time-course of phoneme representations. Significant transfer at phoneme level occurred in preschoolers, as well as schoolchildren and adults. In addition, we found a relationship between auditorymotor adaptation and phonological awareness in both groups of children. Overall, these results suggest that phoneme representations emerge before literacy acquisition, and that these sensorimotor representations may set the ground for phonological awareness.

Learning to Read Interacts with Children’s Spoken Language Fluency

“…Research has shown that this metalinguistic knowledge is in fact not only necessary for developing fluent reading (review in English: Goswami & Bryant, 2016;in French: Alegria & Mousty, 2004;in German: Fricke et al, 2016;Landerl & Wimmer, 2008), it also contributes to the development of fine-grained perceptual abilities (review in Mayo et al, 2003), and interacts with speech production fluency (Noiray et al, 2019b;Saletta et al, 2016). Noiray et al (2019b) recently found that German children enrolled in the first grade performed better in tasks probing the manipulation of small phonemic units as compared to preliterate children, who only performed well with larger phonological units (e.g., syllables, rimes, see similar findings in preliterate French children : Caudrelier et al, 2019, in English: Morais, 2003; review in Shankweiler & Fowler, 2004). This suggests that phonemic decoding/encoding training in school stimulates children's awareness of the structural combinatoriality of their native language and improves their ability to manipulate various size compounds (e.g., Studdert-Kennedy & Goldstein, 2003;Ziegler & Goswami, 2005).…”

“…This assumption was validated. However, reading fluency involves more complex relationships than speech (e.g., Caudrelier et al, 2019;Mayo et al, 2003;Noiray et al, 2019b;Saletta, 2019). Figure 7 provides a conceptual illustration of those differences.…”

What anticipatory coarticulation in children tells us about speech motor control maturity

“…Indeed, syllables produced by 4-year-old children, which are the main units of babbling and of bi-syllabic first words, may still be represented in a holistic manner, for example in the form of a motor program or a gestural score specifically dedicated to the production of a syllable, or they may be represented as a sequence of phonemes, since at this age children are in the middle of a cognitive process transforming their representations from a holistic to one that includes a segmental component (see [28], for a summary of related studies). We hypothesize that in a group of 4-year-old children, coarticulation patterns within a syllable may vary significantly across subjects, since some of the children may be able to control syllables as serial-order motor tasks, whereas others would still rely on a holistic specification, with the possibility that both representations coexist in a subject, with different weights, as suggested by Caudrelier et al (2019) [58].…”

“…Working hypotheses. In aiming to compare the speech motor performances of children below age 6 with that of adults, and to explain any observed differences, we chose to study 4-year-old children for two main reasons: (1) it is generally acknowledged that these children have acquired some representations of the phonemes of their language [28,[56][57][58], and (2) from a motor control perspective, based on the studies described earlier, age four is around the onset of a period during which sensorimotor representations are beginning to play an increasing role in motor planning and motor control (see also [45,59]). Consistent with the emergence of phonemic representations at this age, we assume that 4-year-old children have moved, or are in the process of moving, from a relatively simple holistic representation of words [60], suitable for the storage of small lexicons in early development, to a more complex representation in which individual phonemes also play an important role, in later phonological development [61].…”

Language exposure predicts children’s phonetic patterning: Evidence from language shift

“…Complete answers to both of these questions require that researchers study children from different language environments-children with different receptive and expressive language experiences. In the past, the role of receptive versus expressive experience was evaluated by studying the influence of lexicon size or degree of phonological awareness on speech development (Caudrelier et al 2019;DePaolis, Vihman, and Keren-Portnoy 2011;Noiray et al 2019; but see Mayr, Howells, and Lewis 2015). Here, the role of the language environment for phonetic development is evaluated in a novel way: by studying speech development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift.…”