Blending into the Crowd: Electrophysiological Evidence of Gestalt Perception of a Human Dyad.

Human faces and bodies are environmental stimuli of special importance that the brain processes with selective attention and a highly specialized visual system. It has been shown recently that the human brain also has dedicated networks for perception of pluralities of human bodies in synchronous motion or in face-to-face interaction. Here we show that a plurality of human bodies that are merely in close spatial proximity are automatically integrated into a coherent perceptual unit.

Explicit access to phonetic representations in 3-month-old infants.

Preverbal infants are particularly good at discriminating syllables that differ by a single phoneme but do they perceive syllables as a whole unit or can they become aware of the underlying phonemes if their attention is attracted to the relevant level of analysis? We trained 3-month-old infants to pair two consonants, co-articulated with different vowels, with two visual shapes. Using event-related potentials, we showed that infants generalize the learned associations to new syllables with respect to the training phase. The systematic pairing of a visual label with a phonetic category is rapidly learned in a few trials, suggesting that phonemes are natural categories for infants but also that phonetic representations are accessible to internal operations outside the linguistic system.

Time dependency of the SNARC effect for different number formats: evidence from saccadic responses.

In line with the suggestion that the strength of the spatial numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect was time dependent, the aim of the present study was to assess whether the association strength depends on the processing time of numerical quantity and/or of the time to initiate responses. More specifically, we examined whether and how the SNARC effect could be modulated by number format and effector type. Experiment 1 compared the effect induced by Arabic numbers and number words on the basis of saccadic responses in a parity judgment task.

Electrophysiological evidence of phonetic normalization across coarticulation in infants.

The auditory neural representations of infants can easily be studied with electroencephalography using mismatch experimental designs. We recorded high-density event-related potentials while 3-month-old infants were listening to trials consisting of CV syllables produced with different vowels (/bX/ or /gX/). The consonant remained the same for the first three syllables, followed (or not) by a change in the fourth position.

Suprasegmental information affects processing of talking faces at birth.

From birth, newborns show a preference for faces talking a native language compared to silent faces. The present study addresses two questions that remained unanswered by previous research: (a) Does the familiarity with the language play a role in this process and (b) Are all the linguistic and paralinguistic cues necessary in this case? Experiment 1 extended newborns' preference for native speakers to non-native ones. Given that fetuses and newborns are sensitive to the prosodic characteristics of speech, Experiments 2 and 3 presented faces talking native and nonnative languages with the speech stream being low-pass filtered.

Early word segmentation in infants acquiring Parisian French: task-dependent and dialect-specific aspects.

Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the same language have partly different segmentation abilities, and whether segmenting a non-native dialect has a cost.

Transitional probabilities and positional frequency phonotactics in a hierarchical model of speech segmentation.

The present study explored the influence of a new metrics of phonotactics on adults' use of transitional probabilities to segment artificial languages. We exposed French native adults to continuous streams of trisyllabic nonsense words. High-frequency words had either high or low congruence with French phonotactics, in the sense that their syllables had either high or low positional frequency in French trisyllabic words.