Infants' Perception of Intonation: Is It a Statement or a Question?

The ability to distinguish phonetic variations in speech that are relevant to meaning is essential for infants' language development. Previous studies into the acquisition of prosodic categories have focused on lexical stress, lexical pitch accent, or lexical tone. However, very little is known about the developmental course of infants' perception of linguistic intonation. In this study, we investigate infants' perception of the correlates of the statement/yes–no question contrast in a language that marks this sentence type distinction only by prosodic means, European Portuguese (EP). Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm, EP‐learning infants at 5–6 and 8–9 months were able to successfully discriminate segmentally varied, single‐prosodic word intonational phrases presented with statement or yes–no question intonation, demonstrating that they are sensitive to the prosodic cues marking this distinction as early as 5 months and maintain this sensitivity throughout the first year. These results suggest the presence of precocious discrimination abilities for intonation across segmental variation, similarly to previous reports for lexical pitch accent, but unlike previous findings for word stress.     

Relationship Between Maternal Sensitivity During Early Interaction and Maternal Ability in Perceiving Infants' Body and Face

Maternal sensitivity has been considered an indicator of mother‐infant quality interaction, however little is known about the perception processes associated to this parental behavior style. Here we aimed to explore the relationship between maternal sensitivity during a face‐to‐face interaction with their infants and maternal ability in perceiving infants' body and face. Thirty‐six 6 month‐old infants and their mothers were videotaped during a mother‐infant interaction to identify those with high and low sensitivity. Then, mothers were tested using an inversion effect paradigm requiring the visual discrimination of upright and inverted pictures of whole bodies and faces of their own and unfamiliar infants; this allowed estimation of their configural perceptual processing abilities. Results showed that high‐sensitivity mothers showed reduced body configural processing for others' infants as compared to configural processing of their own infant, whereas low‐sensitivity mothers were engaged in comparable body configural processing independently from infant identity. Infants' face configural processing did not distinguish between high‐ and low‐sensitivity mothers. Our findings suggest that high‐sensitivity mothers have refined their use of configural processing of body postures to be selective for their own infants, suggesting that this visuo‐perceptual strategy makes much more efficient the mothers' ability in detecting, discriminating and recognizing own infant's cues.     

Developmental Changes in Infants’ Ability to Cope with Dialect Variation in Word Recognition

Toward the end of their first year of life, infants’ overly specified word representations are thought to give way to more abstract ones, which helps them to better cope with variation not relevant to word identity (e.g., voice and affect). This developmental change may help infants process the ambient language more efficiently, thus enabling rapid gains in vocabulary growth. One particular kind of variability that infants must accommodate is that of dialectal accent, because most children will encounter speakers from different regions and backgrounds. In this study, we explored developmental changes in infants’ ability to recognize words in continuous speech by familiarizing them with words spoken by a speaker of their own region (North Midland‐American English) or a different region (Southern Ontario Canadian English), and testing them with passages spoken by a speaker of the opposite dialectal accent. Our results demonstrate that 12‐ but not 9‐month‐olds readily recognize words in the face of dialectal variation.     

Resolving the (Apparent) Talker Recognition Paradox in Developmental Speech Perception

The infant literature suggests that humans enter the world with impressive built‐in talker processing abilities. For example, newborns prefer the sound of their mother's voice over the sound of another woman's voice, and well before their first birthday, infants tune in to language‐specific speech cues for distinguishing between unfamiliar talkers. The early childhood literature, however, suggests that preschoolers are unable to learn to identify the voices of two unfamiliar talkers unless these voices are highly distinct from one another, and that adult‐level talker recognition does not emerge until children near adolescence. How can we reconcile these apparently paradoxical messages conveyed by the infant and early childhood literatures? Here, we address this question by testing 16.5‐month‐old infants (N = 80) in three talker recognition experiments. Our results demonstrate that infants at this age have difficulty recognizing unfamiliar talkers, suggesting that talker recognition (associating voices with people) is mastered later in life than talker discrimination (telling voices apart). We conclude that methodological differences across the infant and early childhood literatures—rather than a true developmental discontinuity—account for the performance differences in talker processing between these two age groups. Related findings in other areas of developmental psychology are discussed.     

Monolingual and bilingual infants’ word segmentation abilities in an inter‐mixed dual‐language task

Previous studies show that young monolingual infants use language‐specific cues to segment words in their native language. Here, we asked whether 8 and 10‐month‐old infants (N = 84) have the capacity to segment words in an inter‐mixed bilingual context. Infants heard an English‐French mixed passage that contained one target word in each language, and were then tested on their recognition of the two target words. The English‐monolingual and French‐monolingual infants showed evidence of segmentation in their native language, but not in the other unfamiliar language. As a group, the English‐French bilingual infants segmented in both of their native languages. However, exploratory analyses suggest that exposure to language mixing may play a role in bilingual infants’ segmentation skills. Taken together, these results indicate a close relation between language experience and word segmentation skills.     

Evidence of Early Language Discrimination Abilities in Infants From Bilingual Environments

Previous research data indicate that soon after birth, infants from monolingual families can discriminate utterances drawn from languages that differ prosodically, but discrimination between rhythmically similar languages, such as English and Dutch, has not yet been established by 2 months of age. In the case of bilinguals, the question of how early they can distinguish between the languages of exposure remains unanswered. The goal of this study was to analyze language discrimination capacities in 4‐month‐old bilingual infants simultaneously exposed to 2 Romance languages belonging to the same rhythmic category, Spanish and Catalan. Using a familiarization‐preference procedure, 2 groups of bilingual‐to‐be infants showed a capacity to discriminate between these 2 familial languages. Moreover, when compared with 2 groups of infants from monolingual environments, the size of the observed effects was the same. These results can be taken as initial evidence of an early capacity to distinguish languages in simultaneous bilingual exposure, thus challenging the hypothesis that language discrimination capacities are delayed in bilinguals.     

Picture Perception in Infants: Generalization From Two‐Dimensional to Three‐Dimensional Displays

Two experiments investigated 9‐month‐old infants’ abilities to recognize the correspondence between an actual three‐dimensional (3D) object and its two‐dimensional (2D) representation, looking specifically at representations that did not literally depict the actual object: schematic line drawings. In Experiment 1 , infants habituated to a line drawing of either a doll or a sheep and were then tested with the actual objects themselves. Infants habituated to the sheep drawing recovered to the unfamiliar but not the familiar object, showing a novelty preference. Infants habituated to the doll drawing, however, recovered to both familiar and unfamiliar objects, failing to show any preference between the two. In Experiment 2 , infants habituated to the 3D objects and were then tested with the 2D line drawings. In this case, both groups of infants showed a preference only for the novel displays. Together these findings demonstrate that 9‐month‐old infants recognize the correspondence between 3D objects and their 2D representations, even when these representations are not literal copies of the objects themselves.     

Limits on Composition of Conceptual Operations in 9‐Month‐Olds

Complex systems are often built from a relatively small set of basic features or operations that can be combined in myriad ways. We investigated the developmental origins of this compositional architecture in 9‐month‐old infants, extending recent work that demonstrated rudimentary compositional abilities in preschoolers. Infants viewed two separate object‐occlusion events that depicted a single‐feature‐change operation. They were then tested with a combined operation to determine whether they expected the outcome of the two feature changes, even though this combination was unfamiliar. In contrast to preschoolers, infants did not appear to predictively compose these simple feature‐change operations. A second experiment demonstrated the ability of infants to track two operations when not combined. The failure to compose basic operations is consistent with limitations on object tracking and early numerical cognition (Feigenson & Yamaguchi, Infancy, 2009, 14, 244). We suggest that these results can be unified via a general principle: Infants have difficulty with multiple updates to a representation of an unobservable.     

Prosodic Structure in Early Word Segmentation: ERP Evidence From Dutch Ten‐Month‐Olds

Recognizing word boundaries in continuous speech requires detailed knowledge of the native language. In the first year of life, infants acquire considerable word segmentation abilities. Infants at this early stage in word segmentation rely to a large extent on the metrical pattern of their native language, at least in stress‐based languages. In Dutch and English (both languages with a preferred trochaic stress pattern), segmentation of strong‐weak words develops rapidly between 7 and 10 months of age. Nevertheless, trochaic languages contain not only strong–weak words but also words with a weak‐strong stress pattern. In this article, we present electrophysiological evidence of the beginnings of weak‐strong word segmentation in Dutch 10‐month‐olds. At this age, the ability to combine different cues for efficient word segmentation does not yet seem to be completely developed. We provide evidence that Dutch infants still largely rely on strong syllables, even for the segmentation of weak–strong words.     

Clause Segmentation by 6‐Month‐Old Infants: A Crosslinguistic Perspective

Each clause and phrase boundary necessarily aligns with a word boundary. Thus, infants' attention to the edges of clauses and phrases may help them learn some of the language‐specific cues defining word boundaries. Attention to prosodically well‐formed clauses and phrases may also help infants begin to extract information important for learning the grammatical structure of their language. Despite the potentially important role that the perception of large prosodic units may play in early language acquisition, there has been little work investigating the extraction of these units from fluent speech by infants learning languages other than English. We report 2 experiments investigating Dutch learners' clause segmentation abilities. In these studies, Dutch‐learning 6‐month‐olds readily extract clauses from speech. However, Dutch learners differ from English learners in that they seem to be more reliant on pauses to detect clause boundaries. Two closely related explanations for this finding are considered, both of which stem from the acoustic differences in clause boundary realizations in Dutch versus English.     

Getting into the Groove: The Development of Tempo‐Flexibility Between 10 and 18 Months of Age

Despite good early rhythm processing abilities, and clear enjoyment of music, infants appear not to be able to spontaneously synchronize their movement to the beat of a song (Zentner and Eerola, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, 2010, 5768). We present a new social bell‐ringing task designed to facilitate synchronous movement to music in infants. Ten‐month‐olds, 18‐month‐olds, and adults were played musical tracks of various tempos and given handheld bells to ring, in the presence of either a live experimenter or an animated nonsocial stimulus. Surface electromyography (EMG) was used to measure the timing of arm movements during periods of bell ringing. Infants showed no evidence of synchronous bell ringing at any tempo. However, while the 10‐month‐olds did not modulate their ringing to the music tempo, the 18‐month‐olds showed tempo‐flexibility. Moreover, 18‐month‐olds displayed more associated behaviors such as bouncing and rocking in the absence (rather than presence) of a social partner, whereas the behavior of the 10‐month‐olds was not modulated by the presence or absence of a social partner. The results suggest a distinction between “moving together” and “moving to the beat,” which may have separate underlying mechanisms and developmental trajectories.     

Word Segmentation in Monolingual Infants Acquiring Canadian English and Canadian French: Native Language,Cross‐Dialect,and Cross‐Language Comparisons

In five experiments, we tested segmentation of word forms from natural speech materials by 8‐month‐old monolingual infants who are acquiring Canadian French or Canadian English. These two languages belong to different rhythm classes; Canadian French is syllable‐timed and Canada English is stress‐timed. Findings of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 show that 8‐month‐olds acquiring either Canadian French or Canadian English can segment bi‐syllable words in their native language. Thus, word segmentation is not inherently more difficult in a syllable‐timed compared to a stress‐timed language. Experiment 4 shows that Canadian French‐learning infants can segment words in European French. Experiment 5 shows that neither Canadian French‐ nor Canadian English‐learning infants can segment two syllable words in the other language. Thus, segmentation abilities of 8‐month‐olds acquiring either a stress‐timed or syllable‐timed language are language specific.     

Phonological Specificity in 12‐ and 17‐Month‐Old French‐Speaking Infants

The literature reports some contradictory results on the degree of phonological specificity of infants’ early lexical representations in the Romance language, French, and Germanic languages. It is not clear whether these discrepancies are because of differences in method, in language characteristics, or in participants’ age. In this study, we examined whether 12‐ and 17‐month‐old French‐speaking infants are able to distinguish well‐pronounced from mispronounced words (one or two features of their initial consonant). To this end, 46 infants participated in a preferential looking experiment in which they were presented with pairs of pictures together with a spoken word well pronounced or mispronounced. The results show that both 12‐ and 17‐month‐old infants look longer at the pictures corresponding to well‐pronounced words than to mispronounced words, but show no difference between the two mispronunciation types. These results suggest that, as early as 12 months, French‐speaking infants, like those exposed to Germanic languages, already possess detailed phonological representations of familiar words.     

A Comparison of Infants' Categorization in Paired and Successive Presentation Familiarization Tasks

Three experiments directly compared infants' categorization in variations of the visual familiarization task. In each experiment, 4‐ or 6‐month‐old infants were familiarized with a collection of dogs or cats and then their response to novel dogs and cats was assessed. In Experiment 1, 4‐month‐old infants responded to the exclusive distinction of dogs or cats when tested in a paired‐comparison task. In Experiments 2 and 3, 6‐month‐old infants, but not 4‐month‐old infants, responded to this same distinction in a successive presentation task, even when the amount of familiarization was equated to that of the paired comparison task. Therefore, familiarization with a particular set of stimuli does not induce infants to respond to a single category but rather they respond to different categories depending on features of the task.     

Relations Between Mother‐Child Interactions and the Neural Correlates of Face Processing in 6‐Month‐Olds

Developmental studies of face processing have revealed age‐related changes in how infants allocate neurophysiological resources to the face of a caregiver and an unfamiliar adult. We hypothesize that developmental changes in how infants interact with their caregiver are related to the changes in brain response. We studied 6‐month‐olds because this age is frequently noted in the behavioral and neurophysiological literature as a time of transition in which infants begin to discriminate more readily between caregivers and unfamiliar adults. We used infants' behavioral responses to an original behavioral paradigm to predict event‐related potential (ERP) responses to pictures of the mother's face and a stranger's face in the same group of participants. Our results suggest that individual differences in infants' proximity‐seeking behaviors during interactions with the mother correlate with their neurophysiological responses to the mother's face as opposed to an unfamiliar face for the Nc component of the ERP. These results have implications for understanding the role of the changing infant‐caregiver relationship on the development of the face processing system in early infancy.     

Ideologised values for British accents1

We report quantitative results from a large online survey of 5010 U.K. informants' reactions to 34 different accents of English, based on simple accent labels. Patterns of accent evaluation, in terms of adjudged levels of prestige, social attractiveness and some other variables, in many regards confirm broad findings from earlier research. Accent‐types associated with ‘standard’ speech are, for example, strongly favoured in the prestige and attractiveness dimensions. Several urban U.K. vernaculars, but not all, are systematically downgraded. On the other hand, robust differences emerge which have not been strongly evidenced previously – particularly differences according to informant gender (with females regularly producing more favourable evaluations) and region (with informants often favouring their own and linked varieties). There are also some important effects by informant age, for example with younger informants attributing less prestige to ‘standard’ accents. We interpret the findings as indicating rather persistent U.K. language‐ideologies around accent difference that are being reconstituted only gradually and in specific regards.     

What's in a Name When It Isn't a Word? 17‐Month‐Olds' Mapping of Nonverbal Symbols to Object Categories

Infants begin acquiring object labels as early as 12 months of age. Recent research has indicated that the ability to acquire object names extends beyond verbal labels to other symbolic forms, such as gestures. This experiment examines the latitude of infants' early naming abilities. We tested 17‐month‐olds' ability to map gestures, nonverbal sounds, and pictograms to object categories using a forced‐choice triad task. Results indicated that infants accept a wide range of symbolic forms as object names when they are embedded in familiar referential naming routines. These data suggest that infants may initially have no priority for words over other symbolic forms as object names, although the relative status of words appears to change with development. The implications of these findings for the development of criteria for determining whether a symbol constitutes an object name early in development are considered.     

Within‐rhythm Class Native Language Discrimination Abilities of Basque‐Spanish Monolingual and Bilingual Infants at 3.5 Months of Age

Language rhythm determines young infants' language discrimination abilities. However, it is unclear whether young bilingual infants exposed to rhythmically similar languages develop sensitivities to cross‐linguistic rhythm cues to discriminate their dual language input. To address this question, 3.5‐month‐old monolingual Basque, monolingual Spanish and bilingual Basque‐Spanish infants' language discrimination abilities (across low‐pass filtered speech samples of Basque and Spanish) have been tested using the visual habituation procedure. Although falling within the same rhythmic class, Basque and Spanish exhibit significant differences in their distributions of vocalic intervals (within‐rhythmic class variation). All infant groups in our study successfully discriminated between the languages, although each group exhibited a different pattern. Monolingual Spanish infants succeeded only when they heard Basque during habituation, suggesting that they were influenced by native language recognition. The bilingual and the Basque monolingual infants showed no such asymmetries and succeeded irrespective of the language of habituation. Additionally, bilingual infants exhibited longer looking times in the test phase as compared with monolinguals, reflecting that bilingual infants attend to their native languages differently than monolinguals. Overall, results suggest that bilingual infants are sensitive to within‐rhythm acoustic regularities of their native language(s) facilitating language discrimination and hence supporting early bilingual acquisition.     

English‐Learning Infants' Representations of Word Forms With Iambic Stress

Retaining detailed representations of unstressed syllables is a logical prerequisite for infants' use of probabilistic phonotactics to segment iambic words from fluent speech. The head‐turn preference study was used to investigate the nature of English‐learners' representations of iambic word onsets. Fifty‐four 10.5‐month‐olds were familiarized to passages containing the nonsense iambic word forms ginome and tupong. Following familiarization, infants were either tested on familiar (ginome and tupong) or near‐familiar (pinome and bupong) versus unfamiliar (kidar and mafoos) words. Infants in the familiar test group (familiar vs. unfamiliar) oriented significantly longer to familiar than unfamiliar test items, whereas infants in the near‐familiar test group (near‐familiar vs. unfamiliar) oriented equally long to near‐familiar and unfamiliar test items. Our results provide evidence that infants retain fairly detailed representations of unstressed syllables and therefore support the hypothesis that infants use phonotactic cues to find words in fluent speech.     

Maternal intrusiveness predicts infants’ event‐related potential responses to angry and happy prosody independent of infant frontal asymmetry

Infants’ social‐cognitive skills first develop within the parent–infant relationship, but large differences between parents exist in the way they approach and interact with their infant. These may have important consequences for infants’ social‐cognitive development. The current study investigated effects of maternal sensitive and intrusive behavior on 6‐ to 7‐month‐old infants’ ERP responses to a socio‐emotional cue that infants are often confronted with from an early age: emotional prosody in infant‐directed speech. Infants may differ in their sensitivity to environmental (including parenting) influences on development, and the current study also explored whether infants’ resting frontal asymmetry conveys differential susceptibility to effects of maternal sensitivity and intrusiveness. Results revealed that maternal intrusiveness was related to the difference in infants’ ERP responses to happy and angry utterances. Specifically, P2 amplitudes in response to angry sounds were less positive than those in response to happy sounds for infants with less intrusive mothers. Whether this difference reflects an enhanced sensitivity to emotional prosody or a (processing) preference remains to be investigated. No evidence for differential susceptibility was found, as infant frontal asymmetry did not moderate effects of sensitivity or intrusiveness.