The influence of infant-directed speech on 12-month-olds' intersensory perception of fluent speech

The present study examined whether infant-directed (ID) speech facilitates intersensory matching of audio--visual fluent speech in 12-month-old infants. German-learning infants\^a audio--visual matching ability of German and French fluent speech was assessed by using a variant of the intermodal matching procedure, with auditory and visual speech information presented sequentially. In Experiment 1, the sentences were spoken in an adult-directed (AD) manner. Results showed that 12-month-old infants did not exhibit a matching performance for the native, nor for the non-native language. However, Experiment 2 revealed that when ID speech stimuli were used, infants did perceive the relation between auditory and visual speech attributes, but only in response to their native language. Thus, the findings suggest that ID speech might have an influence on the intersensory perception of fluent speech and shed further light on multisensory perceptual narrowing

Auditory-Visual Perception of Acoustically Degraded Prosodic Contrastive Focus in French

Previous studies have shown that visual only perception of prosodic contrastive focus in French is possible. The aim of this study was to determine whether the visual modality could be combined to the auditory one and lead to a perceptual enhancement of prosodic focus. In order to examine this question, we carried out auditory only, audiovisual and visual only perception tests. In order to avoid a ceiling effect, auditory only perception of prosodic focus being very high, we used whispered speech for which the acoustic prosodic information is degraded. The productions of two different speakers were used. This test showed that adding the visual modality enhances auditory perception of prosodic focus when the acoustic prosodic cues are degraded. Index Terms: audiovisual, prosody, perception, whispered speech, contrastive focu

Chapitre 5. La parole, entre objets vocaux et objets du monde

La parole transdisciplinaire La parole est l’ensemble des mécanismes (de perception, d’action) qui permettent aux humains de communiquer par le langage oral. Elle est la prise en charge directe du langage par le corps. Corps perceptivo-moteur (percevoir, produire), corps audio-vocal (une bouche pour parler, une oreille pour entendre), ou plutôt audio-visuo-orofacial (l’œil perçoit les gestes du conduit vocal et de la face, autant que l’oreille les entend) et même audio-visuo-oro-facio-brachio..

LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC INFLUENCE ON PHONEME DEVELOPMENT: FRENCH AND DREHU DATA

This study extends a cross-linguistic collaboration on phonological development, which aims at comparing production of word-initial sequences of consonant-vowel (CVs) across sets of languages which have comparable phonemes that differ in overall frequency or in the frequency with which they occur in analogous sound sequences. By comparing across languages, the influence of language-specific distributional patterns on phoneme mastery can be disentangled from the effects of more general phonetic constraints on development. We made word and non-word repetition experiments with Frenchand Drehu-acquiring two-year-old to five-year-old children. We first analysed production in words according to frequency data in French and Drehu. Results show that productions of word-initial consonants are correlated with their frequencies, especially in younger children. Then we compared the non-word production scores of French- and Drehu-acquiring children. French and Drehu learners have similar mean scores but show different patterns for specific phonemes that differ in frequency