The development of infants' sensitivity to native versus non-native rhythm.

Speech rhythm is considered one of the first windows into the native language, and the taxonomy of rhythm classes is commonly used to explain early language discrimination. Relying on formal rhythm classification is problematic for two reasons. First, it is not known to which extent infants' sensitivity to language variation is attributable to rhythm alone, and second, it is not known how infants discriminate languages not classified in any of the putative rhythm classes.

The McGurk effect in the time of pandemic: Age-dependent adaptation to an environmental loss of visual speech cues.

Seeing a person's mouth move for [ga] while hearing [ba] often results in the perception of "da." Such audiovisual integration of speech cues, known as the McGurk effect, is stable within but variable across individuals. When the visual or auditory cues are degraded, due to signal distortion or the perceiver's sensory impairment, reliance on cues via the impoverished modality decreases.

Perceptual sensitivity to vowel quality and vowel length in the first year of life.

The perceptual attunement to native vowel categories has been reported to occur at 6 months of age. However, some languages contrast vowels both in quality and in length, and whether and how the acquisition of spectral and duration-cued contrasts differs is uncertain. This study traced the development of infants' sensitivity to native (Czech) vowel-length and vowel-quality contrasts.

Spectrum as a perceptual cue to vowel length in Czech, a quantity language.

Vowel length contrasts in quantity languages are typically realized primarily through duration. This study tested whether spectral cues contribute to the perceptual identification of the short-long monophthongal contrasts in two varieties of Czech. Results showed that listeners attend to spectrum as well as to duration, both for the high vowel-length pairs, which display consistent spectral differentiation in production, and for the remaining contrasts, whose spectral differences are subtle.