Marginal contrast in loanword phonology:Production and perception

Though Dutch is usually described as lacking a voicing contrast at the velar place of articulation, due to intense language contact and heavy lexical borrowing, a contrast between /k/ and /g/ has recently been emerging. We explored the status of this contrast in Dutch speakers in both production and perception. We asked participants to produce loanwords containing a /g/ in the source language (e.g., goal) and found a range of productions, including a great many unadapted [g] tokens. We also tested the same speakers on their perception of the emerging [k] ~ [g] contrast and found that our participants were able to discriminate the emerging contrast well. We additionally explored the possibility that those speakers who use the new contrast more in production are also better at perceiving it, but we did not observe strong evidence of such a link. Overall, our results indicate that the adoption of the new sound is well advanced in the population we tested, but is still modulated by individual-level factors. We hold that contrasts emerging through borrowing, like other phonological contrasts, are subject to perceptual and functional constraints, and that these and other ‘marginal contrasts’ must be considered as full-fledged parts of phonology

Navigating Accent Variation: A Developmental Perspective

Adult processing of other-accented speech is fast, dependent on lexical access, and readily generalizable to new words. But what does children's processing of other-accented speech look like? Although many acquisition researchers have emphasized how other-accented speech presents a formidable challenge to young children, we argue that the field has perhaps underestimated children's early accent processing abilities. In support of this view, we present evidence that 2-year-olds’ accent processing abilities appear to be in many respects adult-like, and discuss the growing literature on children's ability to cope with multi-accent input in the natural world. We outline different theoretical outlooks on the transition children make from infancy to later childhood, and discuss how the growing sophistication of infants’ accent processing abilities feeds into their social perception of the world (and perhaps vice versa). We also argue that efficient processing and meaningful interpretation of accent variation are fundamental to human cognition, and that early proficiency with accent variation (along with all of the implied representational and learning capacities) is difficult to explain without assuming the early emergence of abstract speech representations

Marginal contrast in loanword phonology: Production and perception

Though Dutch is usually described as lacking a voicing contrast at the velar place of articulation, due to intense language contact and heavy lexical borrowing, a contrast between /k/ and /g/ has recently been emerging. We explored the status of this contrast in Dutch speakers in both production and perception. We asked participants to produce loanwords containing a /g/ in the source language (e.g., goal) and found a range of productions, including a great many unadapted [g] tokens. We also tested the same speakers on their perception of the emerging [k] ~ [g] contrast and found that our participants were able to discriminate the emerging contrast well. We additionally explored the possibility that those speakers who use the new contrast more in production are also better at perceiving it, but we did not observe strong evidence of such a link. Overall, our results indicate that the adoption of the new sound is well advanced in the population we tested, but is still modulated by individual-level factors. We hold that contrasts emerging through borrowing, like other phonological contrasts, are subject to perceptual and functional constraints, and that these and other ‘marginal contrasts’ must be considered as full-fledged parts of phonology

PAPER French-learning toddlers use gender information on determiners during word recognition

Abstract In gender-marking languages, the gender of the noun determines the form of the preceding article

Speech Perception in Early Childhood: Contending with Speaker and Accent Variation

Understanding spoken language is much more complex than common intuition may suggest. Speaker-related variation in the realization of words due to changes in speaker gender and accent results in myriad possible realizations of the same word. Although adult listeners can easily accommodate such speaker-specific pronunciations, research suggests that children have more difficulty with this variability. In this thesis, I examine when and how children learn to contend with speaker and accent variation. In three lines of research, I test the hypothesis that infants and toddlers may be less challenged by acoustic variability than past research suggests. In Chapter 2, I show that 15-month-old infants, like adults, can readily accommodate an unfamiliar Australian accent after hearing a 2-minute story produced in Australian English. Interestingly, speaker exposure only elicits accommodation when infants are highly familiar with the words in the story. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that lexical feedback serves as the mechanism inducing accent adaptation. More support for this idea comes from Chapter 3, where even 20-month-olds were found to experience difficulty accommodating a speaker’s unfamiliar accent when the speaker uses hard words that are not consistently known by children this age. Chapter 3 further shows that 28-month-olds, but not 20-month-olds, recognize words produced in sentence frames by a speaker with an unfamiliar accent without any prior exposure to the accent, thereby providing converging evidence that young children are proficient at dealing with accent variability. Chapter 4 subsequently demonstrates that even 7.5-month-olds can contend with some forms of speaker variation when tested under relatively natural listening conditions. Taken together, these three lines of research provide compelling evidence for the view that early speech processing abilities are remarkably sophisticated and that the transition from infant to adult listener may be less abrupt than currently thought.Ph

Infants' acquisition of grammatical gender dependencies

To successfully understand spoken language, listeners need to determine how words within sentences relate to one another. Although the ability to compute relationships between word categories is known to develop early in life, little research has been conducted on infants’ early sensitivity to subcategorical dependencies, such as those evoked by grammatical gender (where the article form is dictated by the noun’s gender). This study therefore examines whether French-learning 18-month-olds track such relationships. Using the Visual Fixation Procedure, infants were presented with article–noun sequences in which the gender-marked article either matched (e.g., laFEM poussetteFEM “the stroller”) or mismatched (e.g., leMASC poussetteFEM) the gender of the noun. A clear preference for correct over incorrect co-occurrences was observed, suggesting that by 18 months of age, children’s storage and access of words is sufficiently sophisticated to include the means to track subcategorical dependencies. This early sensitivity to gender information may be greatly beneficial for constraining lexical access during online language processing

Toddlers' word recognition in an unfamiliar regional accent : the role of local sentence context and prior accent exposure

Adults are generally adept at recognizing familiar words in unfamiliar accents. However, studies testing young children’s abilities to cope with accent-related variation in the speech signal have generated mixed results, with some work emphasizing toddlers’ early competence and other work focusing more on their long-lasting difficulties in this domain. Here, we set out to unify these two perspectives and propose that task demands may play a crucial role in children’s recognition of accented words. To this end, Canadian-English-learning 28-month-olds’ looks to images on a screen were recorded while they were presented with a Scottish-accented speaker instructing them to find a depicted target object. To examine the effect of task demands, both local sentence context and prior accent exposure were manipulated. Overall, Canadian toddlers were found to recognize Scottish-accented words successfully, showing above-chance performance in the identification of words produced in an unfamiliar accent, even when target labels were presented in isolation. However, word recognition was considerably more robust when target words were presented in sentence context. Prior exposure to the unfamiliar Scottish accent in the laboratory did not modulate children’s performance in this task. Taken together, these findings suggest that at least some task-related factors can affect children’s recognition of accented words. Understanding unfamiliar accents, like understanding familiar accents, is thus not an isolated skill but, rather, is susceptible to contextual circumstances. Future models of spoken language processing in toddlerhood should incorporate these early effects of task demands

Input matters : multi-accent language exposure affects word form recognition in infancy

Early language input is far from uniform, even among children learning the same language. For instance, while some children are exposed to a single accent in their linguistic environment, others have routine exposure to multiple accents. Nonetheless, few studies have taken this into account when examining word recognition, and none has examined this issue in infants prior to the emergence of phonological constancy (~18 months). This study demonstrates that daily exposure to multiple accents strongly impacts infants’ performance in a laboratory word form recognition task. Accent variability in the input thus needs to be carefully considered when studying speech development