Publications by authors named "T Nazzi"
Infants begin to segment word forms from fluent speech-a crucial task in lexical processing-between 4 and 7 months of age. Prior work has established that infants rely on a variety of cues available in the speech signal (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Infants' sensitivity to language-specific phonotactic regularities emerges between 6- and 9- months of age, and this sensitivity has been shown to impact other early processes such as wordform segmentation and word learning. However, the acquisition of phonotactic regularities involving perceptually low-salient phonemes (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMost languages of the world use lexical tones to contrast words. Thus, understanding how individuals process tones when learning new words is fundamental for a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying word learning. The current study asked how tonal information is integrated during word learning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The auditory system encodes the phonetic features of languages by processing spectro-temporal modulations in speech, which can be described at two time scales: relatively slow amplitude variations over time (AM, further distinguished into the slowest <8-16 Hz and faster components 16-500 Hz), and frequency modulations (FM, oscillating at higher rates about 600-10 kHz). While adults require only the slowest AM cues to identify and discriminate speech sounds, infants have been shown to also require faster AM cues (>8-16 Hz) for similar tasks.
Methods: Using an observer-based psychophysical method, this study measured the ability of typical-hearing 6-month-olds, 10-month-olds, and adults to detect a change in the vowel or consonant features of consonant-vowel syllables when temporal modulations are selectively degraded.
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates how young infants discriminate lexical tones based on their native language, age, language experience, and tone properties, revealing important insights into language learning.
- Conducted across 13 laboratories globally, it involved testing monolingual and bilingual infants aged 5 to 17 months using the same experimental setup focused on Cantonese tone contrasts.
- Results show that while infants not exposed to Cantonese effectively discriminated between non-native tone contrasts, Cantonese-learning infants did not demonstrate significant native discrimination, suggesting persistent tone sensitivity in infants and challenging current theories on perceptual narrowing.