Assessing Signal-Driven Mechanisms in Neonates: Brain Responses to Temporally and Spectrally Different Sounds

Past studies have found that, in adults, the acoustic properties of sound signals (such as fast versus slow temporal features) differentially activate the left and right hemispheres, and some have hypothesized that left-lateralization for speech processing may follow from left-lateralization to rapidly changing signals. Here, we tested whether newborns’ brains show some evidence of signal-specific lateralization responses using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and auditory stimuli that elicits lateralized responses in adults, composed of segments that vary in duration and spectral diversity. We found significantly greater bilateral responses of oxygenated hemoglobin (oxy-Hb) in the temporal areas for stimuli with a minimum segment duration of 21 ms, than stimuli with a minimum segment duration of 667 ms. However, we found no evidence for hemispheric asymmetries dependent on the stimulus characteristics. We hypothesize that acoustic-based functional brain asymmetries may develop throughout early infancy, and discuss their possible relationship with brain asymmetries for language

Graphic loans: East Asia and beyond

The national languages of East Asia (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) have made extensive use of a type of linguistic borrowing sometimes referred to as a 'graphic loan'. Such loans have no place in the conventional classification of loans based on Haugen (1950) or Weinreich (1953), and research on loan word theory and phonology generally overlooks them. The classic East Asian phenomenon is discussed and a framework is proposed to describe its mechanism. It is argued that graphic loans are more than just 'spelling pronunciations', because they are a systematic and widespread process, independent of but not inferior to phonological borrowing. The framework is then expanded to cover a range of other cases of borrowing between languages to show that graphic loans are not a uniquely East Asian phenomenon, and therefore need to be considered as a major category of loan

Adaptation des emprunts (une approche psycholinguistique)

L hypothèse testée dans la présente thèse postule que les adaptations des emprunts résultent d un calcul de la distance acoustique entre les structures non-natives et les structures natives phonotactiquement légales, c.a.d. du processus d assimilation perceptive. Deux aspects de ce processus ont été démontrés : (a) la sensibilité des adaptations immédiates au détail phonétique fin de la langue source, démontrée dans des tests de perception de pseudo-mots français et anglais chez les locuteurs japonais ; (b) la sensibilité des adaptations immédiates au mode de présentation (auditif versus visuel) de mots non-natifs, de montrée sur la base des adaptations de voyelles anglaises par les locuteurs français. De plus, le lien entre la présence des non-adaptations et une bonne discrimination de contrastes concernés par les locuteurs de la langue cible a été mis en évidence. Un modèle d adaptation perceptive des structures non-natives est proposé.In this thesis I test the hypothesis as to which loanword adaptations result from an evaluation of acoustic distance between non-native structures and phonotactically legal native structures, i.e. from a process of perceptual assimilation. Two aspects of this process have been demonstrated: (a) the sensibility of online adaptations to the fine-grained phonetic detail of the source language, which was shown by testing the perception of French and English /n/-final words by Japanese speakers; (b) the sensibility of online adaptations to the presentation mode (auditif vs visual) of new non-native words, which was shown on the basis of online adaptations of English vowels by French speakers. Moreover, I have found evidence for a link between the presence of non-adaptations in the target language and the capacity of its speakers to correctly discriminate related contrasts in the source language. Finally, a model of perceptual adaptation of non-native structures is proposed.ST DENIS-BU PARIS8 (930662101) / SudocSudocFranceF