Effects of simultaneous speech and sign on infants’ attention to spoken language

Objectives: To examine the hypothesis that infants receiving a degraded auditory signal have more difficulty segmenting words from fluent speech if familiarized with the words presented in both speech and sign compared to familiarization with the words presented in speech only. Study Design: Experiment utilizing an infant-controlled visual preference procedure. Methods: Twenty 8.5-month-old normal-hearing infants completed testing. Infants were familiarized with repetitions of words in either the speech + sign (n = 10) or the speech only (n = 10) condition. Results: Infants were then presented with four six-sentence passages using an infant-controlled visual preference procedure. Every sentence in two of the passages contained the words presented in the familiarization phase, whereas none of the sentences in the other two passages contained familiar words.Infants exposed to the speech + sign condition looked at familiar word passages for 15.3 seconds and at nonfamiliar word passages for 15.6 seconds, t (9) = -0.130, p = .45. Infants exposed to the speech only condition looked at familiar word passages for 20.9 seconds and to nonfamiliar word passages for 15.9 seconds. This difference was statistically significant, t (9) = 2.076, p = .03. Conclusions: Infants\u27 ability to segment words from degraded speech is negatively affected when these words are initially presented in simultaneous speech and sign. The current study suggests that a decreased ability to segment words from fluent speech may contribute towards the poorer performance of pediatric cochlear implant recipients in total communication settings on a wide range of spoken language outcome measures

Assimilation of Voicing in Czech Speakers of English: The Effect of the Degree of Accentedness

Czech and English are languages which differ with respect to the implementation of voicing. Unlike in English, there is a considerable agreement between phonological (systemic) and phonetic (actual) voicing in Czech, and, more importantly, the two languages have different strategies for the assimilation of voicing across the word boundary. The present study investigates the voicing in word-final obstruents in Czech speakers of English with the specific aim of ascertaining whether the degree of the speakers’ foreign accent correlates with the way they treat English obstruents in assimilatory contexts. L2 speakers, divided into three groups of varying accentedness, were examined employing categorization and a voicing profile method for establishing the presence/absence of voicing. The results suggest that speakers with a different degree of Czech accent do differ in their realization of voicing in the way predicted by a negative transfer of assimilatory habits from Czech

Hotel archiphilia

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 118-121).Jean-Francois de Bastide's mid-eighteenth century novel, The Little House, describes an erotic encounter between a persistent man, and a reluctant woman. More remarkably, the novel introduces a third character, the estate where the seduction takes place. The house not only serves as setting, but as an active aphrodisiac, the male's invaluable teammate in the game that unfolds. The suburban retreat helps the characters escape from their concerns in nearby Paris. It inserts itself into the narrative as an active participant. But, in this day and age, can anyone really take this claim seriously? Is it even viable beyond the realm of literature? Can architecture really perform as a character, rather than as mere backdrop in the narratives that unfold around it? This thesis examines architecture's role as a participatory agent within the bounds of a multi-program escape in Boston's Chinatown, serving as a prototype test case.by Thaddeus P. Jusczyk.M.Arch

Narrowing perceptual sensitivity to the native language in infancy: exogenous influences on developmental timing

The infancy literature situates the perceptual narrowing of speech sounds at around 10 months of age, but little is known about the mechanisms that influence individual differences in this developmental milestone. We hypothesized that such differences might in part be explained by characteristics of mother-child interaction. Infant sensitivity to syllables from their native tongue was compared longitudinally to sensitivity to non-native phonemes, at 6 months and again at 10 months. We replicated previous findings that at the group level, both 6- and 10- month-olds were able to discriminate contrasts in their native language, but only 6-month-olds succeeded in discriminating contrasts in the non-native language. However, when discrimination was assessed for separate groups on the basis of mother-child interaction—a ‘high contingency group’ and a ‘moderate contingency’ group—the vast majority of infants in both groups showed the expected developmental pattern by 10 months, but only infants in the ‘high contingency’ group showed early specialization for their native phonemes by failing to discriminate non-native contrasts at 6-months. The findings suggest that the quality of mother-child interaction is one of the exogenous factors influencing the timing of infant specialization for speech processing

Sensitivity to speech rhythm explains individual differences in reading ability independently of phonological awareness

This study considered whether sensitivity to speech rhythm can predict concurrent variance in reading attainment after individual differences in age, vocabulary and phonological awareness have been controlled. Five to six-year-old English-speaking children completed a battery of phonological processing assessments and reading assessments, along with a simple word stress manipulation task. The results showed that performance on the stress manipulation measure predicted a significant amount of variance in reading attainment after age, vocabulary, and phonological processing had been taken into account. These results suggest that stress sensitivity is an important, yet neglected aspect of English-speaking children?s phonological representations, which needs to be incorporated into theoretical accounts of reading development

A computational simulation of children's performance across three nonword repetition tests

The nonword repetition test has been regularly used to examine children’s vocabulary acquisition, and yet there is no clear explanation of all of the effects seen in nonword repetition. This paper presents a study of 5-6 year-old children’s repetition performance on three nonword repetition tests that vary in the degree of their lexicality. EPAM-VOC, a model of children’s vocabulary acquisition, is then presented that captures the children’s performance in all three repetition tests. The model represents a clear explanation of how working memory and long-term lexical and sub-lexical knowledge interact in a way that is able to simulate repetition performance across three nonword tests within the same model and without the need for test specific parameter settings

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