Infants use phonetic detail in speech perception and word learning when detail is easy to perceive

Growth modeling was applied to monolingual ( N = 26) and bilingual ( N = 28) word learning from 14 to 36 months. Level and growth rate of vocabulary were lower for Finnish-Russian bilinguals than for Finnish monolinguals. Processing of Finnish speech sounds at 7 but not at 11 months predicted level, but not growth rate of vocabulary in both Finnish and Russian; this relationship was the same for monolinguals and bilinguals. The bilinguals’ two vocabularies developed differently, showing no acceleration in Russian, the minority language. Even though the bilinguals progressed more slowly in each home language, they were learning at least as many new words as the monolinguals when Finnish and Russian vocabularies were counted together.

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Speech perception, word learning, and language acquisition in infancy: The voyage continues

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s0142716418000243 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 39 (4) ◽

pp. 769-777 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Janet F. WERKER

Keyword(s):

Speech Perception ◽

Language Acquisition ◽

Word Learning

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Bilingual beginnings to learning words

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rstb.2009.0105 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 364 (1536) ◽

pp. 3649-3663 ◽

Cited By ~ 38

Author(s):

Janet F. Werker ◽

Krista Byers-Heinlein ◽

Christopher T. Fennell

Keyword(s):

Early Childhood ◽

Speech Perception ◽

Language Acquisition ◽

Experimental Research ◽

Word Learning ◽

Conceptual Development ◽

Learning Mechanisms ◽

Language Discrimination ◽

Infancy And Early Childhood

At the macrostructure level of language milestones, language acquisition follows a nearly identical course whether children grow up with one or with two languages. However, at the microstructure level, experimental research is revealing that the same proclivities and learning mechanisms that support language acquisition unfold somewhat differently in bilingual versus monolingual environments. This paper synthesizes recent findings in the area of early bilingualism by focusing on the question of how bilingual infants come to apply their phonetic sensitivities to word learning, as they must to learn minimal pair words (e.g. ‘cat’ and ‘mat’). To this end, the paper reviews antecedent achievements by bilinguals throughout infancy and early childhood in the following areas: language discrimination and separation, speech perception, phonetic and phonotactic development, word recognition, word learning and aspects of conceptual development that underlie word learning. Special consideration is given to the role of language dominance, and to the unique challenges to language acquisition posed by a bilingual environment.

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What Can a Child Do With One Normal-Hearing Ear? Speech Perception and Word Learning in Children With Unilateral and Bilateral Hearing Losses Relative to Peers With Normal Hearing

Ear and Hearing ◽

10.1097/aud.0000000000001028 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol Publish Ahead of Print ◽

Author(s):

Andrea L. Pittman ◽

Beatriz de Diego-Lázaro

Keyword(s):

Speech Perception ◽

Word Learning ◽

Normal Hearing

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Sensitivity to grammatical and sociophonetic variability in perception

Laboratory Phonology Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology ◽

10.1515/labphon.2010.006 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Katie K. Drager

Keyword(s):

Speech Perception ◽

Social Characteristics ◽

Social Meaning ◽

Grammatical Function ◽

Speaker Normalization ◽

Discourse Marker ◽

Phonetic Variation ◽

Phonetic Detail ◽

Phonetic Reduction

AbstractPhonetic realizations vary depending on social characteristics of the speaker, and recent research provides evidence that individuals are sensitive to at least some of these sociophonetic relationships during perception (Strand and Johnson, Gradient and visual speaker normalization in the perception of fricatives, Mouton, 1996; Hay et al., Journal of Phonetics 34: 458–484, 2006). In addition to socially-conditioned variation, there is evidence that phonetic realizations in production vary depending on the grammatical function of a word (Plug, Phonetic reduction and categorisation in exemplar-based representation:Observations on a Dutch discourse marker, 2005; Hay and Bresnan, The Linguistic Review 23: 321–349, 2006), yet it is not known whether listeners can actively exploit this phonetic variation in speech perception. This paper reports on three perception experiments conducted to determine whether perceivers' sensitivity to fine phonetic detail can assist in extraction of both grammatical and social meaning from the signal.

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