Language and Speech articles from June 2003

Language and Speech archives from June 2003

Preface.(Editorial)
June 1, 2003... The impetus for this special issue was provided by the Workshop on Early Phonological Acquisition, held in Carry-le-Rouet, France, in October 2001. At this interdisciplinary meeting, over a dozen specialists in experimental psychology and...

Phonological acquisition: recent attainments and new challenges *.
June 1, 2003... Abstract Infants' phonological acquisition during the first 18 months of life has been studied within experimental psychology for some 30 years. Current research themes include statistical learning mechanisms, early lexical development,...

Phonetic diversity, statistical learning, and acquisition of phonology *.
June 1, 2003... Abstract In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in the domain of prosody and intonation. This article...

A statistical basis for speech sound discrimination *.
June 1, 2003... Abstract Infants under six months are able to discriminate native and non-native consonant contrasts equally well, but as they learn the phonological systems of their native language, this ability declines. Current explanations of this...

Infant perception of non-native consonant contrasts that adults assimilate in different ways *.
June 1, 2003... Abstract Numerous findings suggest that non-native speech perception undergoes dramatic changes before the infant's first birthday. Yet the nature and cause of these changes remain uncertain. We evaluated the predictions of several...

Simultaneous bilingualism and the perception of a language-specific vowel contrast in the first year of life *.
June 1, 2003... Abstract Behavioral studies have shown that while young infants can discriminate many different phonetic contrasts, a shift from a language-general to a language-specific pattern of discrimination is found during the second semester of...

Early word learners' ability to access phonetic detail in well-known words *.
June 1, 2003... Abstract Several recent studies from our laboratory have shown that 14-month-old infants have difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects when tested in the Switch task. Because the infants...

Phonetic detail in the developing lexicon *.
June 1, 2003... Abstract Although infants show remarkable sensitivity to linguistically relevant phonetic variation in speech, young children sometimes appear not to make use of this sensitivity. Here, children's knowledge of the sound-forms of familiar...

Learning foreign vowels *.
June 1, 2003... Abstract Two hypotheses have recently been put forward to account for listeners" ability to distinguish and learn contrasts between speech sounds in foreign languages. First, Best's Perceptual Assimilation Model and Flege's Speech Learning...