Bringing the toys to life: Animacy, reference, and anthropomorphism in Toy Story

In the children’s film Toy Story, toys spring to life when their human owners are away, creating an alternative world of transferred animacy relations signalled by visual and linguistic cues. The storylines and characters explore the nature of animacy and relationships between conspecifics and ‘others’. Our analysis focuses on the use of referring expressions as they reflect the animacy of their referents, as it develops and changes during the course of the narrative. We relate these findings to well-established scales of animacy which link our perception of the world to the categories imposed by language. We find that, as predicted by models of animacy proposed by Dahl (2008) and Yamamoto (1999), among others, shifts in reference – specifically from common noun to proper noun to pronoun, and from collective to individuated referents – reflect characters’ shifting conceptualisation of, and empathy with, each other. We argue that referring expressions are used at key points in the film script to subtly mediate accessible cues to animacy like eyes, speech and motion, and to guide viewers’ empathies and allegiances, extending our understanding of animacy beyond ordinary anthropocentrism

Late phonological development in Spanish children with bilateral hearing loss / Desarrollo fonologico tardio en ninos espanoles con perdidas auditivas bilaterales

This study has a twofold objective: to analyse and compare the phonological processes in a sample of Spanish children with hearing loss, both with a cochlear implant and with a hearing aid, with a group with normal hearing; and to determine whether there are differences between the participants with a cochlear implant and with a hearing aid in the frequency and nature of the phonological processes. The sample is made up of 168 participants, eight with hearing loss (four with an implant and four with a hearing aid) and 160 with normal hearing. Samples of spontaneous speech were collected and transcribed using the tools from the CHILDES project. For the analysis, the phonological processes paradigm was adopted, evaluating phonological development based on normative error rates. The participants with a hearing loss show slower phonological development in terms of phonological processes, along with atypical processes. Furthermore, the participants with cochlear implants committed more phonological errors than those that wear a hearing aid. The implications of the results are discussed, and it is recommended that auditory stimulation should be done early in children with hearing loss regardless of their technical aid

Self-Organization: Complex Dynamical Systems in the Evolution of Speech

International audienceHuman vocalization systems are characterized by complex structural properties. They are combinatorial, based on the systematic reuse of phonemes, and the set of repertoires in human languages is characterized by both strong statistical regularities - universals--and a great diversity. Besides, they are conventional codes culturally shared in each community of speakers. What is the origins of the forms of speech? What are the mechanisms that permitted their evolution in the course of phylogenesis and cultural evolution? How can a shared speech code be formed in a community of individuals? This chapter focuses on the way the concept of self-organization, and its interaction with natural selection, can throw light on these three questions. In particular, a computational model is presented and shows that a basic neural equipment for adaptive holistic vocal imitation, coupling directly motor and perceptual representations in the brain, can generate spontaneously shared combinatorial systems of vocalizations in a society of babbling individuals. Furthermore, we show how morphological and physiological innate constraints can interact with these self-organized mechanisms to account for both the formation of statistical regularities and diversity in vocalization systems

The relationship between infants' production experience and their processing of speech

The early relationship between children\u2019s emerging articulatory abilities and their capacity to processspeech input was investigated, following recent studies with English-learning infants. Twenty-six 10monolingual Italian-learning infants were tested at 6 months (no consistent and stable use of consonants,or vocal motor schemes [VMS]) and at the age at which they displayed use of at least one VMS.Perceptual testing was based on lists of nonwords containing one of three categories of sounds each:produced by infant (own VMS), not yet produced but typical of that age (other VMS), or not typicallyproduced by infants at that age (non-VMS). In addition, size of expressive lexicon at 12 months 15and 18 months was assessed using an Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates CommunicativeDevelopment Inventory (CDI). The results confirmed a relation between infant preverbal productionand attentional response to VMS and also between age at first VMS and 12-month vocabulary.Maternal input is shown not to be a specific determinant of individual infant production preferences.A comparison between the English and Italian experimental findings shows a stronger attentional 20response to VMS in isolated words as compared to sentences. These results confirm the existence ofan interaction between perception and production that helps to shape the way that language develops

Early phonetic and lexical development: A productivity approach

Researchers frequently examine the development of the single-word lexicon in the absence of phonetic data. Yet a large body of literature demonstrates relationships between the phonetics of babble and early speech, and it is clear that production skill is essential for establishing a lexicon. This study uses longitudinal productivity criteria to establish children's phonetic skill. Twenty children were followed from age 9 to 16 months, and their level of consistency of vocal patterns was examined in relation to their lexical production, providing a relatively largesample demonstration of phonetic/lexical relationships at the transition to language. Number of specific consonants produced consistently across the months of observation predicted referential lexical use at 16 months, whereas the transition to reference itself signaled the onset of a sharp increase in numbers of different words produced in a session. The earliest referential speakers exhibited prior consistency in the production of [p/b], which also predominated in their words. Prior use of at least two supraglottal consonants characterized the referential group. Children varied in the specific consonants they produced consistently, and these same consonants, varying according to individual child repertoire, characterized nearly all consonant-based words produced by each child in both of the final 2 months of observation. These findings are interpreted in relation to the children's contemporaneous development of representational ability and pragmatic skill