Phonetic representation of frequent function words in 8-month-old infants

Contains fulltext : 64153.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Recent work by a number of researchers showed that even preverbal infants detect and recognize functors in continuous speech. In our research, English-learning infants aged 11 to 13 months, but not 8 months, recognized frequent and infrequent functors as a class, and represented them in segmental detail (Shi et al., 2003; Shi et al., 2004). Here we report a study on 8-month-old infants' recognition and representation of high versus low frequency functors. Infants heard sequences containing a lexical word preceded by a high frequency functor "the," versus a nonsense functor "kuh," differing from "the" only in the initial consonant, with the prosody unchanged. Another group of 8-month-olds heard sequences containing a lexical word preceded by a low frequency functor "its", versus a nonsense functor "ots". Recognition of functors would be indicated by longer listening time to sequences containing real functors. Results reveal no differential listening time between "the+lexical word (LW)" and "kuh+LW," nor between "its+LW" and "ots+LW;" however, "the+LW" and "kuh+LW" together induced longer listening time than "its+LW" and "ots+LW." We conclude that 8-month olds recognize the frequent, familiar "the" in continuous speech, but it is underspecified phonetically in infants' initial lexicon. Our previous work indicates detailed specification by 11 months.1 p

Recognition and representation of function words in Englishlearning infants

We examined infants’ recognition of functors and the accuracy of the representations that infants construct of the perceived word forms. Auditory stimuli were “Functor + Content Word” versus “Nonsense Functor + Content Word” sequences. Eight-, 11-, and 13-month-old infants heard both real functors and matched nonsense functors (prosodically analogous to their real counterparts but containing a segmental change). Results reveal that 13-month-olds recognized functors with attention to segmental detail. Eight-month-olds did not distinguish real versus nonsense functors. The performance of 11-month-olds fell in between that of the older and younger groups, consistent with an emerging recognition of real functors. The three age groups exhibited a clear developmental trend. We propose that in the earliest stages of vocabulary acquisition, function elements receive no segmentally detailed representations, but such representations are gradually constructed so that once vocabulary growth starts in earnest, fully specified functor representations are in place to support it

Temporal lobe dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia during performance of a speech and non-speech analogue detection task: An event-related fMRI study

Both functional and structural temporal lobe abnormalities have been linked to symptoms of auditory hallucinations and thought disorder in patients with schizophrenia. In an event-related fMRI study, we used an oddball detection task that required neither identification nor linguistic analysis, in order to determine if functional temporal lobe abnormalities are present in schizophrenia during the early stages of speech and auditory processing. 14 healthy control subjects and 14 schizophrenic patients heard Ž nonsense speech sounds and matched sine wave analogues non. speech . In a similar study completed previously in 15 healthy subjects, speech stimuli were found to elicit significantly greater activation than non-speech analogues in classic receptive language Ž. areas, namely in the middle temporal gyrus MTG and in the Ž. superior temporal gyrus STG . In the present study, this finding was replicated in the healthy control subjects. Speech stimuli were also found to elicit significantly greater activation than non-speech analogues in the MTG and in the STG of the schizophrenic patients. Nevertheless, in both the speech and non-speech conditions schizophrenic patients showed significantly less activation in the MTG and in the STG than that shown by control subjects. The detection of speech in an auditory stream is an important first step in processing spoken language. These results suggest that, although schizophrenic subjects can detect the difference between speech and non-speech at a basic level, the functioning of the receptive language areas of the temporal lobe are nonetheless impaired during the early stages of speech and auditory processin