Spoken word recognition in a second language: The importance of phonetic details.

Spoken word recognition depends on variations in fine-grained phonetics as listeners decode speech. However, many models of second language (L2) speech perception focus on units such as isolated syllables, and not on words. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how fine-grained phonetic details (i.

Developmental change in children's speech processing of auditory and visual cues: An eyetracking study.

This study investigates how children aged two to eight years ( = 129) and adults ( = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from explicit behavioural measures. Participants were presented with familiar words in audio-visual (AV), audio-only (A-only) or visual-only (V-only) speech modalities, then presented with target and distractor images, and looking to targets was measured.

A Shift in the Direction of the Production Effect in Children Aged 2-6 Years.

Research has found mixed evidence for the production effect in childhood. Some studies have found a positive effect of production on word recognition and recall, while others have found the reverse. This paper takes a developmental approach to investigate the production effect.

Monolingual and bilingual children's processing of coarticulation cues during spoken word recognition.

Bilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues' respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we extended an investigation of the processing of coarticulation in two- to three-year-old English monolingual children (Zamuner, Moore & Desmeules-Trudel, 2016) to a group of four- to six-year-old English monolingual children and age-matched English-French bilingual children.

Phonology, Semantics, and the Comprehension-Expression Gap in Emerging Lexicons.

Purpose Children come to understand many words by the end of their 1st year of life, and yet, generally by 12 months, only a few words are said. In this study, we investigated which linguistic factors contribute to this comprehension-expression gap the most. Specifically, we asked the following: Are phonological neighborhood density, semantic neighborhood density, and word frequency (WF) significant predictors of the probability that words known (understood) by children would appear in their spoken lexicons? Method Monosyllabic words in the active (understood and said) and passive (understood, not said) lexicons of 201 toddlers were extracted from the Dutch Communicative Development Inventory (Zink & Lejaegere, 2002) parent-completed forms.

Correction to: Gradient and categorical patterns of spoken-word recognition and processing of phonetic details.

The Publisher regrets that, due to a typesetting mistake, it has now become necessary to make the following corrections: All phonetic transcriptions (between square brackets and slashes) should be corrected and displayed as follows, in the same font.

Gradient and categorical patterns of spoken-word recognition and processing of phonetic details.

The speech signal is inherently rich, and this reflects complexities of speech articulation. During spoken-word recognition, listeners must process time-dependent perceptual cues, and the role that these cues play varies depending on the phonological status of the sounds across languages. For example, Canadian French has both phonologically nasal vowels (i.

Reverse production effect: children recognize novel words better when they are heard rather than produced.

This research investigates the effect of production on 4.5- to 6-year-old children's recognition of newly learned words. In Experiment 1, children were taught four novel words in a produced or heard training condition during a brief training phase.

The many facets of speech production and its complex effects on phonological processing.

In our commentary, we discuss two additional points about developmental speech production. First, we suggest that more precision is needed to accurately describe 'speech production' processes, and we suggest that hierarchical constructs from the adult literatures on articulatory phonology and speech motor control may be applicable to infants as well. Second, we discuss the implications from data that indicate that the effects of production are subject to task-, attentional-, linguistic-, and experience-related demands.

Toddlers' sensitivity to within-word coarticulation during spoken word recognition: Developmental differences in lexical competition.

To understand speech, listeners need to be able to decode the speech stream into meaningful units. However, coarticulation causes phonemes to differ based on their context. Because coarticulation is an ever-present component of the speech stream, it follows that listeners may exploit this source of information for cues to the identity of the words being spoken.

Understanding the developing sound system: interactions between sounds and words.

Unlabelled: Over the course of the first 2 years of life, infants are learning a great deal about the sound system of their native language. Acquiring the sound system requires the infant to learn about sounds and their distributions, sound combinations, and prosodic information, such as syllables, rhythm, and stress. These aspects of the phonological system are being learned simultaneously as the infant experiences the language around him or her.

Infants track word forms in early word-object associations.

A central component of language development is word learning. One characterization of this process is that language learners discover objects and then look for word forms to associate with these objects (Mcnamara, 1984; Smith, 2000). Another possibility is that word forms themselves are also important, such that once learned, hearing a familiar word form will lead young word learners to look for an object to associate with it (Juscyzk, 1997).

The structure and nature of phonological neighbourhoods in children's early lexicons.

This research examines phonological neighbourhoods in the lexicons of children acquiring English. Analyses of neighbourhood densities were done on children's earliest words and on a corpus of spontaneous speech, used to measure neighbours in the target language. Neighbourhood densities were analyzed for words created by changing segments in word-onset position (rhyme neighbours as in pin/bin), vowel position (consonant neighbours as in pin/pan/) and word-offset position (lead neighbours as in pin/pit).

Phonotactic probabilities at the onset of language development: speech production and word position.

Purpose: To examine the role of phonotactic probabilities at the onset of language development, in a new language (Dutch), while controlling for word position.

Method: Using a nonword imitation task, 64 Dutch-learning children (age 2;2-2;8 [years;months]) were tested on how they imitated segments in low- and high-phonotactic probability environments, in word-initial and word-final position. The relationship between phonological representations and vocabulary development was examined by comparing children's performance with their receptive and expressive vocabularies.

Sensitivity to Word-Final Phonotactics in 9- to 16-Month-Old Infants.

Previous research has shown that infants begin to display sensitivities to language-specific phonotactics and probabilistic phonotactics at around 9 months of age. However, certain phonotactic patterns have not yet been examined, such as contrast neutralization, in which phonemic contrasts are neutralized typically in syllable- or word-final position. Thus, the acquisition of contrast neutralization is dependent on infants' ability to perceive certain contrasts in final position.

Phonotactic probabilities in young children's speech production.

This research explores the role of phonotactic probability in two-year-olds' production of coda consonants. Twenty-nine children were asked to repeat CVC non-words that were used as labels for pictures of imaginary animals. The CVC non-words were controlled for their phonotactic probabilities, neighbourhood densities, word-likelihood ratings, and contained the identical coda across low and high phonotactic probability pairs.