Spécificité phonétique : de la perception précoce à l’acquisition des premiers mots

Dans ce chapitre, nous présentons des recherches portant sur la spécificité phonétique des premiers mots, utilisant soit des tâches de reconnaissance de mots connus, soit des tâches impliquant des processus d’acquisition de mots nouveaux. Cette discussion traitera du lien entre développement phonologique et acquisition lexicale. De nouvelles données seront présentées (Nazzi, 2005), montrant que des enfants de 20 mois peuvent acquérir simultanément deux mots nouveaux s’ils sont phonétiquement différents, ou s’ils se distinguent minimalement par une consonne (en position initiale de mot ou pas), mais pas s’ils ne diffèrent que par l’une de leur voyelle. Nous discuterons des implications de ces nouvelles données sur notre compréhension de la spécificité des premiers mots, et soulèverons la possibilité d’une contribution différente des voyelles et des consonnes à l’acquisition lexicale précoce.In this chapter, we review research, bearing on the issue of the phonetic specificity of early words, using either known word recognition tasks or tasks investigating the processes involved in the acquisition of new words. This review will address the issue of the link between phonological development and lexical acquisition. New findings will be presented (Nazzi, 2005), showing that 20-month-old infants can simultaneously learn two words if they are phonetically different or if they differ minimally by one of their consonants (whether or not in word-initial position), but not if they differ by one of their vowels. We will discuss the implications of these new findings for our understanding of the phonetic specificity of early words, and will discuss the possibility of a different contribution of vowels and consonants to early lexical acquisition

Infants’ statistical word segmentation in an artificial language is linked to both parental speech input and reported production abilities

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Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Spanish

​Studies across many languages (e.g., Dutch, English, Farsi, Spanish, Xhosa) have failed to show early acquisition of subject-verb agreement, while recent studies on French reveal acquisition by 30 months of age. Using a similar procedure as in previous French studies, the present study evaluated whether earlier comprehension of subject-verb agreement in (Mexican) Spanish can be revealed when task demands are lowered. Two experiments using a touch-screen pointing task tested comprehension of SV agreement by monolingual Spanish-speaking children growing up in Mexico City, between about 3 and 5 years of age. In Experiment 1, the auditory stimuli consisted of a transitive verb+pseudonoun object (e.g. agarra el micho ‘he throws the micho’ vs. agarran el duco ‘they throw the duco’); results failed to show early comprehension of SV agreement, replicating previous findings. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli were used, with the crucial difference that the word objeto ‘object’ replaced all pseudonouns; results revealed SV agreement comprehension as early as 41 to 50 months. Taken together, our findings show that comprehension at this age is facilitated when task demands are lowered, here by not requiring children to process pseudowords (even when these were not critical to the task). These findings hence underscore the importance of task-/stimulus-specific features when testing early morphosyntactic development, and suggest that previous results may have underestimated Spanish-speaking children’s competence

Effect of Bilingualism on Lexical Stress Pattern Discrimination in French-Learning Infants

Monolingual infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language around 6 to 9 months of age, a fact marked by the development of preferences for predominant prosodic patterns and a decrease in sensitivity to non-native prosodic properties. The present study evaluates the effects of bilingual acquisition on speech perception by exploring how stress pattern perception may differ in French-learning 10-month-olds raised in bilingual as opposed to monolingual environments. Experiment 1 shows that monolinguals can discriminate stress patterns following a long familiarization to one of two patterns, but not after a short familiarization. In Experiment 2, two subgroups of bilingual infants growing up learning both French and another language (varying across infants) in which stress is used lexically were tested under the more difficult short familiarization condition: one with balanced input, and one receiving more input in the language other than French. Discrimination was clearly found for the other-language-dominant subgroup, establishing heightened sensitivity to stress pattern contrasts in these bilinguals as compared to monolinguals. However, the balanced bilinguals' performance was not better than that of monolinguals, establishing an effect of the relative balance of the language input. This pattern of results is compatible with the proposal that sensitivity to prosodic contrasts is maintained or enhanced in a bilingual population compared to a monolingual population in which these contrasts are non-native, provided that this dimension is used in one of the two languages in acquisition, and that infants receive enough input from that language

Infants’ sensitivity to nonadjacent vowel dependencies: The case of vowel harmony in Hungarian

Vowel harmony is a linguistic phenomenon whereby vowels within a word share one or several of their phonological features, constituting a nonadjacent, and thus challenging, dependency to learn. It can be found in a large number of agglutinating languages, such as Hungarian and Turkish, and it may apply both at the lexical level (i.e., within word stems) and at the morphological level (i.e., between stems and their affixes). Thus, it might affect both lexical and morphological development in infants whose native language has vowel harmony. The current study asked at what age infants learning an irregular harmonic language, Hungarian, become sensitive to vowel harmony within word stems. In a head-turn preference study, 13-month-old, but not 10-month-old, Hungarian-learning infants preferred listening to nonharmonic VCV (vowel–consonant–vowel) pseudowords over vowel-harmonic ones. A control experiment with 13-month-olds exposed to French, a nonharmonic language, showed no listening preference for either of the sequences, suggesting that this finding cannot be explained by a universal preference for nonharmonic sequences but rather reflects language-specific knowledge emerging between 10 and 13 months of age. We discuss the implications of this finding for morphological and lexical learning

Language specificity in cortical tracking of speech rhythm at the mora, syllable, and foot levels

Published: 05 August 2022Recent research shows that adults’ neural oscillations track the rhythm of the speech signal. However, the extent to which this tracking is driven by the acoustics of the signal, or by language-specific processing remains unknown. Here adult native listeners of three rhythmically different languages (English, French, Japanese) were compared on their cortical tracking of speech envelopes synthesized in their three native languages, which allowed for coding at each of the three language’s dominant rhythmic unit, respectively the foot (2.5 Hz), syllable (5 Hz), or mora (10 Hz) level. The three language groups were also tested with a sequence in a non-native language, Polish, and a non-speech vocoded equivalent, to investigate possible differential speech/nonspeech processing. The results first showed that cortical tracking was most prominent at 5 Hz (syllable rate) for all three groups, but the French listeners showed enhanced tracking at 5 Hz compared to the English and the Japanese groups. Second, across groups, there were no differences in responses for speech versus non-speech at 5 Hz (syllable rate), but there was better tracking for speech than for non-speech at 10 Hz (not the syllable rate). Together these results provide evidence for both language-general and language-specific influences on cortical tracking.In Australia, this work was supported by a Transdisciplinary and Innovation Grant from Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Dynamics of Language. In France, the work was funded by an ANR-DFG grant (ANR-16-FRAL-0007) and funds from LABEX EFL (ANR-10-LABX-0083) to TN, and a DIM Cerveau et Pensées grant (2013 MOBIBRAIN). In Japan, the work was funded by JSPS grant-in-aid for Scientific Research S(16H06319) and for Specially Promoted Research (20H05617), MEXT grant for Innovative Areas #4903 (17H06382) to RM

L’acquisition de l’accord sujet-verbe par les jeunes francophones natifs entre 14 et 30 mois : préférence, compréhension et environnement linguistique (The acquisition of subject-verb agreement by young native French speakers between 14 and 30 months: preference, understanding, and linguistic environment)

The aim of this study is to contribute to the current debate on the nature of morphosyntactic representations in young children which opposes two hypotheses. On the one hand, the so-called lexicalist or constructivist approaches suggest that the young child is sensitive to the structures he frequently hears and that the first constructions he represents are based on combinations of specific linguistic elements. understood combinations of inflected words and marks. On the other hand, generative theories give a lesser role to the linguistic environment and stresses the importance of the capacities of young children to form abstract morphosyntactic representations which do not systematically reflect the frequency of combinations in the linguistic environment and which apply to lexical categories (eg Noun, verb etc) and are not limited to colloquial words. The analysis of the spontaneous production of young children is the traditional method that has been most often used to test these hypotheses. The study presented below tests the two hypotheses at the heart of the current debate by using two other complementary experimental approaches - the Head Turn Paradigm and the Intermodal Paradigm of the Preferential Gaze - which make it possible to study the preference and the understanding of the chord. subject-verb in native French speakers between 14 and 30 months. The data obtained on 88 children between 14 and 30 months were analyzed. The verbs and constructions used in the experiments are also the subject of detailed quantitative analyzes of the language to which young children are exposed. These analyzes covered a total number of 54,000 statements. These three sources of data on the preference and understanding of agreement in young children and the properties of the linguistic environment allow us to contribute to the current debate on the nature of early morphosyntactic representations. The results of the three studies reveal a) that 18-month-old French speakers prefer grammatical constructions that involve a Nominal Syntagma and an irregular verb in the third person singular and plural, b) that at 30 months children understand constructions that contain a third-person clitic subject and a verb that begins with a vowel, in the singular and in the plural and c) that these two results do not directly reflect the statements to which the children are exposed in which the forms and constructions tested are not frequent and which reveal a significant asymmetry between the singular and the plural. These results do not seem compatible with the so-called “lexicalist” or “constructivist” hypotheses according to which the performance of children of these ages should reflect the combinations and forms frequent in the linguistic environment. This study allowed us to better understand the morposyntactic capacities of the young child. The preference data are compatible with those published on English and German, but our study makes an additional contribution because the forms used in our experience are not regular

Developing knowledge of nonadjacent dependencies

Characterizing the nature of linguistic representations and how they emerge during early development is a central goal in the cognitive science of language. One area in which this development plays out is in the acquisition of dependencies—relationships between co-occurring elements in a word, phrase, or sentence. These dependencies often involve multiple levels of representation and abstraction, built up as infants gain experience with their native language. The authors used the Headturn Preference Procedure to systematically investigate the early acquisition of 1 such dependency, the agreement between a subject and verb in French, at 6 different ages between 14 and 24 months. The results reveal a complex developmental trajectory that provides the first evidence that infants might indeed progress through distinct stages in the acquisition of this nonadjacent dependency. The authors discuss how changes in general cognition and representational knowledge (from reflecting surface statistics to higher-level morphological features) might account for their findings. These findings highlight the importance of studying language acquisition at close time intervals over a substantial age range

Converging evidence of underlying competence: Comprehension and production in the acquisition of Spanish subject-verb agreement

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring Mexican Spanish gain competence with 3rd-person SV agreement, testing production as well as comprehension in the same children aged between 3;6 and 5;7 years, and whether comprehension of SV agreement is modulated by the sentential position of the verb (i.e., medial vs. final position). Accuracy and sensitivity analyses show that comprehension performance correlates with SV agreement production abilities, and that comprehension of singular and plural third-person forms is not influenced by the sentential position of the agreement morpheme. Issues of the appropriate outcome measure and the role of structural familiarity in the development of abstract representations are discussed