Maternal Depression Affects Infants’ Lexical Processing Abilities in the Second Year of Life

Published: 12 December 2020Maternal depression and anxiety have been proposed to increase the risk of adverse outcomes of language development in the early years of life. This study investigated the e ects of maternal depression and anxiety on language development using two approaches: (i) a categorical approach that compared lexical abilities in two groups of children, a risk group (mothers with clinical-level symptomatology) and a control non-risk group, and (ii) a continuous approach that assessed the relation between individual mothers’ clinical and subclinical symptomatology and their infants’ lexical abilities. Infants’ lexical abilities were assessed at 18 months of age using an objective lexical processing measure and a parental report of expressive vocabulary. Infants in the risk group exhibited lower lexical processing abilities compared to controls, and maternal depression scores were negatively correlated to infants’ lexical processing and vocabulary measures. Furthermore, maternal depression (not anxiety) explained the variance in infants’ individual lexical processing performance above the variance explained by their individual expressive vocabulary size. These results suggest that significant di erences are emerging in 18-month-old infants’ lexical processing abilities, and this appears to be related, in part, to their mothers’ depression and anxiety symptomatology during the postnatal period.This research was supported, in part, by an Australian Postgraduate Award PhD scholarship, the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and a DevelopmentWriting Fellowship to the first author, as well as the ARC grant # FL130100014 to the sixth author. The second author’s work is supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018–2021 program and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Ramon y Cajal Research Fellowship, PID2019-105528GA-I00

Depression and Anxiety in the Postnatal Period: An Examination of Infants' Home Language Environment, Vocalizations, and Expressive Language Abilities

Published 2020 August 3This longitudinal study investigated the effects of maternal emotional health concerns, on infants' home language environment, vocalization quantity, and expressive language skills. Mothers and their infants (at 6 and 12 months; 21 mothers with depression and or anxiety and 21 controls) provided day-long home-language recordings. Compared with controls, risk group recordings contained fewer mother-infant conversational turns and infant vocalizations, but daily number of adult word counts showed no group difference. Furthermore, conversational turns and infant vocalizations were stronger predictors of infants' 18-month vocabulary size than depression and anxiety measures. However, anxiety levels moderated the effect of conversational turns on vocabulary size. These results suggest that variability in mothers' emotional health influences infants' language environment and later language ability.18569924/University of Western Sydne

Acquisition pattern and the role of vocabulary and language experience in the acquisition of inflectional grammar by Mandarin-English speaking preschoolers

Australian Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers must acquire linguistic structures that occur only in the community language (e.g., English inflectional grammar). This study investigated how they acquire such structures and any relationship between linguistic knowledge and language experience on their performance. Twenty 4–6-year-olds showed known monolingual acquisition patterns with good performance for producing the progressive, developing ability for plurals, but only emerging ability for past and present tense. Better performance was related to a larger English vocabulary, more mixed language input and use, but less Mandarin input and use. On average, these children received less than 50% input in English and were performing behind monolinguals

The Acquisition of coda consonants by Mandarin early child L2 learners of English

Little is known about the acquisition of phonology in children learning a second language before the age of four. The study of Mandarin children's early learning of English coda consonants is of particular interest because of the different syllable structures permitted in the two languages. Using an elicited imitation task, this study explored the acquisition of coda consonants and related phrase-final lengthening in twelve three-year-old Mandarin-speaking children exposed to Australian English at preschool. Performance was good on /t/ and /s/ codas, but worse on the phonologically and morphologically more complex /ts/ coda. Although /n/ is one of the few codas permitted in Mandarin, both perceptual and acoustic analysis revealed surprisingly poor performance, suggesting possible L1 Mandarin effects. As expected, longer exposure to English resulted in better coda production. The results are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms underlying L2 phonological and morphological acquisition in early child second language learners (ECL2).14 page(s

Linguistic tonal systems

2 page(s

Five-Year-olds' Acoustic Realization of Mandarin Tone Sandhi and Lexical Tones in Context Are Not Yet Fully Adult-Like

Large numbers of children around the world are learning tone languages, but few studies have examined the acoustic properties of children's early tone productions. Even more scarce are acquisition studies on tone sandhi, a tone change phenomenon which alters the surface realization of lexical tones. Two studies using perceptual coding report the emergence of lexical tone and tone sandhi at around 2 years (Li and Thompson, 1977; Hua and Dodd, 2000). However, the only acoustic study available shows that 3-year-olds are not yet adult-like in their lexical tone productions (Wong, 2012). This raises questions about when children's productions become acoustically adult-like and how their tone productions differ from those of adults. These questions were addressed in the current study which compared Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers' (3–5-year-olds) tone productions to that of adults. A picture naming task was used with disyllabic real words familiar to pre-schoolers. Overall children produced appropriate tone contours for all tones, i.e., level for tone 1, rising for tones 2, 3 and full sandhi, falling for tone 4 and half sandhi. However, children's productions were not adult-like for tones 3, 4, and the sandhi forms, in terms of coordinating pitch range, slope and curvature, with little evidence of development across ages. These results suggest a protracted process in achieving adult-like acoustic realization of both lexical and sandhi tones

The Perception of Mandarin tones by learners from heritage and non-heritage backgrounds

Two groups of non-native adult learners of Mandarin in Australia were compared in their ability to perceive monosyllabic Mandarin words contrasting in lexical tones. They differed in their linguistic experience (non-heritage (n=7), heritage (n=8)). A group of seven native Mandarin speakers was included as controls. All non-native learners used English as their primary language of communication. However, the heritage learners were able to communicate in Cantonese as well as English. The question of interest was whether heritage learners’ knowledge of contrastive tone in Cantonese might give them an advantage over English speaking learners in perceiving tone contrasts in Mandarin. In general, there were more similarities than differences between the two groups in their response patterns. Of the six tone contrasts examined (T1-T2, T1-T3, T1-T4, T2-T3, T2-T4, T3-T4), the two groups of learners clearly diverged on T1-T2 and T1-T4 contrasts in opposite directions. The heritage learners were more accurate on T1-T2 and less accurate on T1-T4 than the non-heritage learners who speak Australian English as their first language. Thus, we conclude that simply having an exposure to and functional knowledge of another tonal language since early childhood does not guarantee accurate perception of Mandarin tones compared to adult learners without prior experience with tonal languages.5 page(s

The Perception of Mandarin lexical tones by listeners from different linguistic backgrounds

Two groups of non-native adult learners of Mandarin in Australia were directly compared in their ability to perceive monosyllabic Mandarin words contrasting in lexical tones. They differed in their linguistic experience (non-heritage (n=10), heritage (n=12)). A group of eight native Mandarin speakers and a group of ten functionally monolingual speakers of Australian English were included as controls. All non-native learners used English as their primary language of communication. However, the heritage learners were able to communicate in Cantonese as well as English. The primary question of interest was whether heritage learners' knowledge of contrastive tone in Cantonese might give them an advantage over English-speaking learners in perceiving tone contrasts in Mandarin. In general, there were more similarities than differences between the two groups of learners in their response patterns. Of the six tone contrasts examined (T1-T2, T1-T3, T1-T4, T2-T3, T2-T4, T3-T4), the two groups significantly differed only on T1-T4. The heritage learners were less accurate on T1-T4 than the non-heritage learners who are monolingual speakers of Australian English. On the other hand, the non-heritage learners were more accurate than Australian English speakers with no prior experience with Mandarin on all tone contrasts. Thus, we conclude that simply having an exposure to and functional knowledge of another tonal language since early childhood does not guarantee accurate perception of Mandarin tones in comparison with adult learners without prior experience with tonal languages.21 page(s

Tone and vowel enhancement in Cantonese infant-directed speech at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of age

Vowel and tone hyperarticulation were investigated in infant-directed speech (IDS) in Cantonese, a tone language. Native Cantonese speaking mothers were recorded speaking to their infants on four occasions, at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months. Unexpectedly, no vowel hyperarticulation in terms of vowel triangle areas or in the dimensions of tongue height or backness (F1 and F2 values) was found in IDS compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). Tone hyperarticulation in IDS, as indexed by the relative area of tone triangles in f0 onset and f0 offset space compared to those in ADS, was found in IDS to infants at all four ages but was reduced somewhat in 12-month-olds. Given that infants' perceptual attunement to lexical tone begins around 4 months, it appears that parents' tone hyperarticulation begins before infants have perceptually tuned into native tones and begins to decline by the end of the first year. This provides support for the hypothesis that tone hyperarticulation serves as a bootstrapping mechanism in early language development in tone languages.12 page(s

Communication and diagnostic cues

10 page(s