מחקרים

The quality of speech directed towards infants may play an important role in infants’ language development. However, few studies have examined the link between the two. We examined the correlation between maternal speech clarity and infant speech perception performance in two groups of Mandarin-speaking mother–infant pairs

Huei-Mei Liu, Patricia K. Kuhl & Feng-Ming Tsao
Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning and Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, USA
Developmental Science, Vol. 6, Issue 3 (2003), F1–F10

Infants under six months are able to discriminate native and non-native consonant
contrasts equally well, but as they learn the phonological systems
of their native language, this ability declines. Current explanations of this
phenomenon agree that the decline in discrimination ability is linked to the
formation of native-language phonemic categories

Jennifer L. Anderson, James L. Morgan & Katherine S. White
Brown University
Language and Speech, 2003, 46 (2-3), 155-182

This article presents an account of how early language experience can impede the acquisition of
non-native phonemes during adulthood. The hypothesis is that early language experience alters
relatively low-level perceptual processing, and that these changes interfere with the formation and
adaptability of higher-level linguistic representations. Supporting data are presented from an experiment
that tested the perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese, German, and American adults.

Paul Iverson1, Patricia K. Kuhl2, Reiko Akahane-Yamada3, Eugen Diesch4, Yohich Tohkura5, Andreas Kettermann6 & Claudia Siebert6
1 Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, UK
2 Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
3 ATR Human Information Science Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan
4 Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany
5 NTT Science and Core Technology Laboratory Group, Atsugi-shi, Kanagawa, Japan
6 Institute of Psychology, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Cognition, Vol. 87, Issue 1 (2003), B47–B57

Of Human Bonding: Newborns Prefer their Mothers' Voices Author(s): Anthony J. DeCasper and William P. Fifer Source: Science, New Series, Vol. 208, No. 4448 (Jun. 6, 1980), pp. 1174-1176 Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1683733

evidence for this in the sheep after day 100 of gestation (8, 9). further question concerns the efficiency of the hearing mechanism within a totally fluid environ- ment; the mammalian fetus is known to move in response to sound from outside the mother (10), and in the guinea pig, prenatal exposure to a specific sound changes the neonate's response to the sound (11).
Anthony J. DeCasper & William P. Fifer
Science, New Series, Vol. 208, Issue 4448 (1980), 1174-1176

This article presents an account of how early language experience can impede the acquisition of
non-native phonemes during adulthood. The hypothesis is that early language experience alters
relatively low-level perceptual processing, and that these changes interfere with the formation and
adaptability of higher-level linguistic representations. Supporting data are presented from an experiment
that tested the perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese, German, and American adults.

Paul Iverson1, Patricia K. Kuhl2, Reiko Akahane-Yamada3, Eugen Diesch4, Yohich Tohkura5, Andreas Kettermann6 & Claudia Siebert6
1 Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, UK
2 Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
3 ATR Human Information Science Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan
4 Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany
5 NTT Science and Core Technology Laboratory Group, Atsugi-shi, Kanagawa, Japan
6 Institute of Psychology, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Cognition, Vol. 87, Issue 1 (2003), B47–B57

Maye, Werker, and Gerken [1] have recently shown that distributional learning may allow tuning of phonetic categories during the first year of life
Janet F. Werker
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia

The purpose of this paper is to present and describe the
Conditioned Head Turn procedure, with primary focus on its
use as a method for testing infant speech perception.

Janet F. Werker1, Linda Polka2 & Judith E. Pegg3
1 University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
2 McGill University, Montreal, Canada
3 B.C. Research Institute for Child and Family Health, Vancouver, Canada
Early Development and Parenting, Vol. 6 (1997), 171-178
 

The effects of linguistic experience on the perceptual classification of
phonological dialect variation were investigated in a series of behavioral experiments
with naïve listeners. A new digital speech corpus was collected which contains audio
recordings of five male and five female talkers from each of six dialect regions in the
United States (New England, Mid-Atlantic, North, Midland, South, and West). The
speech materials recorded from each talker included isolated words, sentences, passages
of connected text, and conversational speech. Acoustic analyses of the vowel systems of
the talkers confirmed significant phonological variation due to regional dialect

Cynthia G. Clopper
Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, USA, 2004

Many studies on developmental speech perception (e.g. Werker & Tees
1984, Kuhl et al. 1992) have documented changes in speech perception that
occur during an infant’s first year of life. These changes are generally
understood to reflect the phonemic structure of the native language (Best et al.
1988, Liberman et al. 1957). There is little research, however, on the
phonological abstractness of these initial phonetic categories acquired in
infancy. One study by Jusczyk and colleagues (1999) found that 9-month-old
infants are sensitive to whether or not a set of sounds shares phonological
features, indicating that by this young age infants have already developed
featural representations.

Jessica Maye & LouAnn Gerken
University of Rochester & University of Arizona
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development

Patterns of developmental change in phonetic perception are critical to theory development. Many previous studies document a decline in nonnative phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months of age

.
Patricia K. Kuhl1, Erica Stevens1, Akiko Hayashi2, Toshisada Deguchi3, Shigeru Kiritani4 & Paul Iverson5
1 Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences and Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, USA
2 Research Institute for the Education of Exceptional Children, Gakugei University, Tokyo, Japan
3 Comprehensive Educational Science, Gakugei University, Tokyo, Japan
4 Institute of Cognitive Sciences in Languages and Cultures, Kobe Kaisei College, Kobe, Japan
5 Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, UK
Developmental Science, Vol. 9, Issue 2 (2006), F13–F21

To test this, we recorded Japanese and English mothers teaching words to their infants. Acoustic analyses revealed language-specific differences in the distributions of the cues used by mothers

(or cues present in the input) to distinguish the vowels. The robust availability of these cues in
maternal speech adds support to the hypothesis that distributional learning is an important
mechanism whereby infants establish native language phonetic categories

.
Janet F. Werker1, Ferran Pons1, Christiane Dietrich1, Sachiyo Kajikawa2, Laurel Fais1 & Shigeaki Amano2
1 Department of Psychology, The University of British Columbia
2 NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Japan

Background and Aims: In order to understand speech, infants must differentiate between phonetic changes that are linguistically contrastive and those that are not. Speech perception research with infants has shown that young infants are very sensitive to fine-grained differences in speech sounds. During the second half of the first year of life, infants focus in on linguistically relevant differences and become less sensitive to some phonetic differences that are not linguistically relevant in their native language

Jennifer Phan & Derek M. Houston
Indiana University School of Medicine

style="text-align: left;">1.1. Sorting out the Sounds
The world’s languages contain many basic elements —
around 600 consonants and 200 vowels [1]. However, each
language uses a unique set of approximately 40 distinct
elements, called phonemes, which change the meaning of
a word (e.g., from bat to pat). But phonemes are actually
groups of non-identical sounds, called phonetic units, which
are functionally equivalent in the language. The infant’s
task is to learn the 40 phonemic categories before trying to
acquire words which depend on these elementary units

.
Patricia K. Kuhl
Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences & Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington
Acoustical Science and Technology, Vol. 28, Issue 2 (2007), 71-83

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