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| 2. |
- Burnham, Denis, et al.
(author)
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Perception of lexical tone across languages : Evidence for a linguisticmode of processing
- 1996
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In: Proceedings of the 4th InternationalConference on Spoken Language Processing. ; , s. 2514-2517
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Pairs of Thai tones were presented for perceptual discrimination inthree linguistic contexts (normal speech, low-pass filtered speech,and as musical (violin) sounds) to tonal language speakers, Thaiand Cantonese, and non-tonal (English) language speakers.English speakers discriminated the tonal contrasts significantlybetter in the musical context than in filtered speech, and in filteredspeech better than in full speech. On the other hand, both Thaiand Cantonese speakers perceived the tonal contrasts equally wellin all three contexts. Thus developmental absence of exposure tolexical tone results in a linguistic mode of processing whichinvolves the attenuation of a basic psychoacoustic ability, pitchdiscrimination.
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| 3. |
- Burnham, Denis, et al.
(author)
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Universality and language-specific experience in the perception of lexical tone and pitch
- 2015
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In: Applied Psycholinguistics. - 0142-7164 .- 1469-1817. ; 36:6, s. 1459-1491
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Two experiments focus on Thai tone perception by native speakers of tone languages (Thai, Cantonese, and Mandarin), a pitch–accent (Swedish), and a nontonal (English) language. In Experiment 1, there was better auditory-only and auditory–visual discrimination by tone and pitch–accent language speakers than by nontone language speakers. Conversely and counterintuitively, there was better visual-only discrimination by nontone language speakers than tone and pitch–accent language speakers. Nevertheless, visual augmentation of auditory tone perception in noise was evident for all five language groups. In Experiment 2, involving discrimination in three fundamental frequency equivalent auditory contexts, tone and pitch–accent language participants showed equivalent discrimination for normal Thai speech, filtered speech, and violin sounds. In contrast, nontone language listeners had significantly better discrimination for violin sounds than filtered speech and in turn speech. Together the results show that tone perception is determined by both auditory and visual information, by acoustic and linguistic contexts, and by universal and experiential factors.
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| 4. |
- Kalashnikova, Marina, et al.
(author)
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OZI: Australian English Communicative Development Inventory
- 2016
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In: First language. - : SAGE Publications. - 0142-7237 .- 1740-2344. ; 36:4, s. 407-427
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- For more than 20 years, the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory(CDI) and its adaptations for languages other than English have been used as reliable measures of infants’ and toddlers’ early receptive and productive vocabulary size. This article introduces the OZI, the Australian English adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates CDI, now normed for 12- to 30-month-old children. The findings of two studies are presented: (1) a comparison study that demonstrated that toddlers (N = 64) acquiring Australian English(24- and 30-month-olds) obtain higher productive vocabulary scores on the OZI than the MacArthur–Bates CDI; and (2) an OZI norming study that included 12- to 30-month-old Australian infants and toddlers (N = 1496). These studies provide (i) evidence for the greater applicability of the OZI for infants and toddlers learning Australian English and (ii) productive vocabulary acquisition norms for Australian English for ages 12–30 months, a research and diagnostic tool highly anticipated by researchers and clinicians around Australia.
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| 5. |
- Kalashnikova, Marina, et al.
(author)
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The development of tone discrimination in infancy : Evidence from a cross‐linguistic, multi‐lab report
- 2024
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In: Developmental Science. - 1363-755X .- 1467-7687. ; 27:3
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We report the findings of a multi-language and multi-lab investigation of young infants’ ability to discriminate lexical tones as a function of their native language, age and language experience, as well as of tone properties. Given the high prevalence of lexical tones across human languages, understanding lexical tone acquisition is fundamental for comprehensive theories of language learning. While there are some similarities between the developmental course of lexical tone perception and that of vowels and consonants, findings for lexical tones tend to vary greatly across different laboratories. To reconcile these differences and to assess the developmental trajectory of native and non-native perception of tone contrasts, this study employed a single experimental paradigm with the same two pairs of Cantonese tone contrasts (perceptually similar vs. distinct) across 13 laboratories in Asia-Pacific, Europe and North-America testing 5-, 10- and 17-month-old monolingual (tone, pitch-accent, non-tone) and bilingual (tone/non-tone, non-tone/non-tone) infants. Across the age range and language backgrounds, infants who were not exposed to Cantonese showed robust discrimination of the two non-native lexical tone contrasts. Contrary to this overall finding, the statistical model assessing native discrimination by Cantonese-learning infants failed to yield significant effects. These findings indicate that lexical tone sensitivity is maintained from 5 to 17 months in infants acquiring tone and non-tone languages, challenging the generalisability of the existing theoretical accounts of perceptual narrowing in the first months of life.
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| 6. |
- Lovcevic, Irena, et al.
(author)
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Neural processing of hyper-and hypo-articulated vowels in Infant-Directed Speech
- 2019
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- When addressing infants, adults use a speech register known as infant-directed speech (IDS). Compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), IDS has a number of distinctive acoustic and linguistic features. Vowel hyperarticulation, the expansion of the acoustic space between the corner vowels /i,u,a/, is one feature specifically proposed to facilitate language acquisition processes. Interestingly, the presence of vowel hyperarticulation in IDS appears to be dependent on the infant’s communicative and linguistic needs. Mothers do not hyperarticulate vowels in IDS to infants with hearing loss (Lam & Kitamura, 2010) or infants at-risk for dyslexia (Kalashnikova et al., 2018), indicating that infants’ ability to hear and process speech can influence speakers’ IDS to them. Given the important role of vowel hyperarticulation in early language acquisition, it is of interest to investigate the effects of IDS with hypo-articulated vowels on infants’ early linguistic processing.This study investigated whether there is a neurophysiological difference in the processing of hyper- and hypo-articulated vowels in IDS by comparing the electroencephalographic (EEG) signatures of typical IDS with hyperarticulated vowels (hyper-IDS), IDS that lacks vowel hyperarticulation (hypo-IDS), and ADS in 9 month-old-infants (N = 12). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while infants listened to familiar words in hyper-IDS, hypo-IDS, and ADS registers. If hyper-IDS facilitates infants’ early lexical processing, we expected it to elicit a different pattern in brain potentials compared to hypo-IDS and ADS.Regarding electrophysiological measures, mean amplitudes were calculated in the 250-500ms time window measured from word onset, since ERP amplitudes in this window have been proposed to reflect increased semantic processing (Kidd et al., 2018; Zangl & Mills, 2007). A Speech (hyper-IDS, hypo-IDS, ADS) x Antpost (frontal, central, parietal, occipital) x Laterality (left, right) ANOVA yielded a main effect of Speech (F(2, 22) = 7.054, p = .004, p2 = .391) and Speech x Antpost x Laterality interaction (F(6, 66) = 2.771, p = .018, p2 = .201), meaning that the factor Speech interacted with topographical factors. Hypo-IDS was found to elicit a broadly distributed negativity compared to hyper-IDS and ADS respectively, which gave rise to more positive amplitudes in the same time window. Taken together, these results suggest a decrease in lexical processing for hypo-IDS.These findings indicate different brain responses to IDS with and without vowel hyperarticulation in early language processing, supporting the assumption that vowel hyperarticulation in IDS influences infants’ early linguistic processing. Given that early brain potentials occurring at 200-500ms have previously been suggested to reflect increased lexical or semantic processing, these findings indicate that infants are sensitive to the specific acoustic qualities of IDS, which facilitate semantic processing (Junge et al., 2014). Importantly, the current findings demonstrate that IDS with hyperarticulated vowels provides infants with a rich linguistic signal. When hyperarticulation is absent, lexical processing appears to be impeded. This is an especially important insight with regard to infants with hearing loss who do not have access to this feature in IDS, but who may instead rely more on other perceptual advantages offered by this register.
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| 7. |
- Schwarz, Iris-Corinna, et al.
(author)
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An expressive vocabulary inventory adaptation to Australian English
- 2003
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In: 14th Australian Language and Speech Conference, Brisbane. ; , s. 43-
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory CDI (Fenson et al., 1993) is widely used to assess early expressive vocabulary development. Its toddler form, Words and Sentences, is validated as a parental vocabulary checklist for 16- to 30-month-old children. The CDI was developed for American English, but has been adapted to assess British (Hamilton, Plunkett, & Schafer, 2000) and New Zealand English vocabularies (Reese & Read, 2000). In this study, the CDI is adapted to Australian English, and various limitations, such as length and imbalance of gender-based items are overcome. This inventory omits grammatical aspects of the original CDI in order to shorten the checklist (see WORDS short form), Corkum & Dunham, 1996) and replaces inappropriate words with Australian English equivalents. This Australian adaptation of the CDI, and its correlations with the original CDI based on approximately 100 children (24 and 30 months) will be presented.
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| 8. |
- Schwarz, Iris-Corinna, 1976-, et al.
(author)
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New measures to chart toddlers' speech perception and language development : A test of the lexical restructuring hypothesis
- 2006
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In: 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ; , s. 89-
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Language acquisition factors at work in toddlers between 2 1/2 and 3 years of age were investigated in the first longitudinal study of this kind. New age-appropriate tasks were devised to measure the development of vocabulary size; articulation accuracy, sensitivity to the phonemic features of, in this case, Australian English; and the degree of specialisation towards the native tongue, as measured by language-specific speech perception; LSSP, with 45 Australian English learning toddlers (18 male, 27 female) at 30, 33, and 36 months of age. Results indicated that (i) that nearly all measures improved linearly over age; (ii) that there were significant correlations between articulation ability and vocabulary size; and (iii) that, in confirmation of the lexical restructuring hypothesis, vocabulary size is significantly predicted by the broad range of native language abilities under the rubric of phoneme sensitivity, but not under the more specific measure of LSSP.
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| 9. |
- Schwarz, Iris-Corinna, 1976-, et al.
(author)
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Phoneme sensitivity predicts vocabulary size in 2 1/2- to 3-year-olds
- 2006
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In: 11th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology. ; , s. 28-
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Sixty Australian English speaking toddlers were tested in a longitudinal study at 30, 33, and 36 months on vocabulary size, phoneme sensitivity, language-specific speech perception, and articulation accuracy. Vocabulary size was measured with the Australian English adaptation of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test III. Phoneme Sensitivity (PS) comprised scores from mispronunciation detection, rhyme detection, and nonword repetition tasks. Language Specific Speech Perception (LSSP) was calculated by subtracting the score for nonnative speech perception from the native score, indicating the degree of specialisation in the native language. Articulation accuracy (AA) was measured with an adaptation of the Queensland Articulation Test. Results showed (i) linear improvements in all new measures, appropriately depicting the developmental trend; (ii) significant correlations between AA and vocabulary size; (iii) predictability of vocabulary size by PS and vice versa at 30, 33, and 36 months. The results provide further evidence for the important role phoneme-sensitive speech perception plays in the process of lexical acquisition.
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