Speech sensorimotor relationships in francophone preschoolers and adults: Adaptation to real-time auditory feedback perturbations.

Purpose: This study investigates the development of sensorimotor relationships by examining adaptation to real-time perturbations of auditory feedback.

Method: Acoustic signals were recorded while preschoolers and adult speakers of Canadian French produced several utterances of the front rounded vowel /ø/ for which F2 was gradually shifted up to a maximum of 40%.

Results: The findings indicate that, although preschool-aged children produced overall similar responses to the perturbed feedback, they displayed significantly more trial-to-trial variability than adults.

Transfer of sensorimotor learning reveals phoneme representations in preliterate children.

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 8-year-old schoolchildren (N = 24), whose phonological awareness was evaluated, and one adult control group (N = 17).