Comparing French syllabification in preliterate children and adults

The influence of development and literacy upon syllabification in French was evaluated by comparing the segmental behavior of 4- to 5-year-old proliferate children and adults using a pause insertion task. Participants were required to repeat bisyllabic words such as "fourmi" (ant) by inserting a pause between its two syllabic components (/fur/-/mi/). In the first experiment we tested segmentation over a range of 49 double intervocalic consonant clusters. A similar general segmentation behavior was observed in both age groups, with a pattern that fit the predictions from a legality principle-based model of syllabification. Experiment 2 revealed that opacity between phonological and orthographic representations lead to increased ambisyllabic responses and a reduction in segmentation consistency in adults. In total, these findings indicate that syllabic forms are consistently represented from an early age, but that segmentation in metalinguistic tasks is susceptible to contamination from spelling and etymological knowledge. © 2007 Cambridge University Press

Perception and awareness of accents in young children

This study examines children's metaphonological awareness for accent-related information in connected speech. In the first experiment, 5- to 6-year-old French-speaking children were asked to discriminate between Southern and Northern accented French in a sentence categorization task. It was found that these children were not able to reliably distinguish between these native variations of their own language, but were able to distinguish between their own accent and a strong foreign accent in Experiment 2. These findings were also replicated using a speaker discrimination task in Experiment 3, where children were asked to detect pairs of speakers sharing the same accent amongst speaker pairs with different accents. Whilst these experiments have shown that 5- to 6-year-old children do not use non-familiar regional accents as a discriminatory cue, they are able to perceive the differences between accents, as demonstrated in the AX task used in Experiment 4. The factors underlying the relative lack of awareness for a regional accent as opposed to a foreign accent in childhood are discussed, especially regarding the amount of exposure and the learnability of both types of accents

Regional and foreign accent processing in English: can listeners adapt?

Recent data suggest that the first presentation of a foreign accent triggers a delay in word identification, followed by a subsequent adaptation. This study examines under what conditions the delay resumes to baseline level. The delay will be experimentally induced by the presentation of sentences spoken to listeners in a foreign or a regional accent as part of a lexical decision task for words placed at the end of sentences. Using a blocked design of accents presentation, Experiment 1 shows that accent changes cause a temporary perturbation in reaction times, followed by a smaller but long-lasting delay. Experiment 2 shows that the initial perturbation is dependent on participants' expectations about the task. Experiment 3 confirms that the subsequent long-lasting delay in word identification does not habituate after repeated exposure to the same accent. Results suggest that comprehensibility of accented speech, as measured by reaction times, does not benefit from accent exposure, contrary to intelligibility

Mortalidad por cáncer bucomaxilofacial según nivel socio económico en la Región Metropolitana período 2002-2014

Tesis (Cirujano Dentista)Objetivo: Describir las tasas de mortalidad de cáncer orofaringeo comunal según IDH. Región Metropolitana, Santiago de Chile, 2002-2014. Material y Método: Estudio ecológico descriptivo. La población fueron los casos de 45 a más años. Se calcularon tasas de mortalidad cruda y ajustada por año y periodo. Se ajustó por método directo para comparar entre comunas y controlar el efecto de la edad, sexo e IDH. Resultados: La tasa ajustada para el periodo fue 3,98 muertes por 100.000 habitantes (5,93 hombres vs 2,3 mujeres). Según IDH, la tasa ajustada fue 15,6% mayor en el grupo de comunas con IDH alto y 13,8% más en el grupo de comunas con IDH medio respecto al grupo de IDH alto. Conclusión: La mortalidad por cáncer bucofaríngeo, entre los años 2002 y 2014, en las diferentes comunas de la Región Metropolitana presentaron una estrecha relación con los indicadores socioeconómicos.Objective: To describe, by commune, the mortality rates of oropharyngeal cancer according to HDI (Human Development Index). Metropolitan Region, Santiago, Chile, 2002-2014. Material and Method: The cases were the 45 years old and more age population., the crude and adjusted mortality rates have been calculating per years and periods. It has been adjusted by direct method to compare among communes and to control the age effect, sex and HDI. Results: The adjusted rate for the period was 3.98 deaths for each 100,000 peoples (5.93 men vs 2.3 women). According to the HDI, the adjusted rate was 15.6% greater in high HDI communes group and 13.8% upper in the medium HDI communes group than in high HDI group. Conclusion: Mortality for oropharyngeal cancer between 2002 and 2014 in the different communes of the Metropolitan Region showed a close relationship with socioeconomic indicators

Infants’ Discrimination of Familiar and Unfamiliar Accents in Speech

This study investigates infants’ discrimination abilities for familiar and unfamiliar regional English accents. Using a variation of the head-turn preference procedure, 5-month-old infants demonstrated that they were able to distinguish between their own South-West English accent and an unfamiliar Welsh English accent. However, this distinction was not seen when two unfamiliar accents (Welsh English and Scottish English) were presented to the infants, indicating they had not acquired the general ability to distinguish between regional varieties, but only the distinction between their home accent and unfamiliar regional variations. This ability was also confirmed with 7-month-olds, challenging recent claims that infants lose their sensitivity to dialects at around that age. Taken together, our results argue in favor of an early sensitivity to the intonation system of languages, and to the early learning of accent-specific intonation and potentially segmental patterns. Implications for the development of accent normalization abilities are discussed

Bias for consonantal information over vocalic information in 30-month-olds: cross-linguistic evidence from French and English.

Using a name-based categorization task, Nazzi found in 2005 that French-learning 20-month-olds can make use of one-feature consonantal contrasts between new labels but fail to do so with one-feature vocalic contrasts. This asymmetry was interpreted as developmental evidence for the proposal that consonants play a more important role than vowels at the lexical level. In the current study using the same task, we first show that by 30 months French-learning infants can make use of one-feature vocalic contrasts (e.g., /pize/-/pyze/). Second, we show that in a situation where infants must neglect either a consonantal one-feature change or a vocalic one-feature change (e.g., match a /pide/ with either a /tide/ or a /pyde/), both French- and English-learning 30-month-olds choose to neglect the vocalic change rather than the consonantal change. We argue that these results suggest that by 30 months of age, infants still give less weight to vocalic information than to consonantal information in a lexically related task even though they are able to process fine vocalic information

Tracking the associative boost in infancy.

Do words that are both associatively and taxonomically related prime each other in the infant mental lexicon? We explore the impact of these semantic relations in the emerging lexicon. Using the head-turn preference procedure, we show that 18-month-old infants have begun to construct a semantic network of associatively and taxonomically related words, such as dog-cat or apple-cheese. We demonstrate that priming between words is longer-lasting when the relationship is both taxonomic and associative, as opposed to purely taxonomic, reflecting the associative boost reported in the adult priming literature. Our results demonstrate that 18-month-old infants are able to construct a lexical-semantic network based on associative and taxonomic relations between words in the network, and that lexical-semantic links are more robust when they are both associative and taxonomic in character. Furthermore, the manner in which activation is propagated through the emerging lexical-semantic network appears to depend upon the type of semantic relation between words. We argue that 18-month-old infants have a mental lexicon that shares important structural and processing properties with that of the adult system