Do Infants Really Learn Phonetic Categories?

Early changes in infants’ ability to perceive native and nonnative speech sound contrasts are typically attributed to their developing knowledge of phonetic categories. We critically examine this hypothesis and argue that there is little direct evidence of category knowledge in infancy. We then propose an alternative account in which infants’ perception changes because they are learning a perceptual space that is appropriate to represent speech, without yet caring up that space into phonetic categories. If correct this new account has substantial implications for understanding early language development.

The Individual’s Perception Space of the Digital Earth

Just as the space of the real world is represented in the human brain (in its perceptual space) not as it really is, so the space of the Digital Earth is represented in the individual's space perception in a distorted way. The mechanism of forming an idea about an object in the perception space of an individual is represented. The structure of the Digital Earth space is discussed. The concept of "virtual-shift" is introduced. It is concluded that the perceptual spaces of the real world and the Digital Earth are turning into a single complex, which can help make the management of sophisticated objects, such as the economy of a particular country or the world economy, more adequate, but can also seriously disrupt it. Assumptions are made as to how this complex is represented in the space of perception of an individual and what are the consequences for the management of the country and international systems.

Cross-Linguistic Perceptual Categorization of the Three Corner Vowels: Effects of Listener Language and Talker Age

The present study examined the center and size of naïve adult listeners’ vowel perceptual space (VPS) in relation to listener language (LL) and talker age (TA). Adult listeners of three different first languages, American English, Greek, and Korean, categorized and rated the goodness of different vowels produced by 2-year-olds and 5-year-olds and adult speakers of those languages, and speakers of Cantonese and Japanese. The center (i.e., mean first and second formant frequencies (F1 and F2)) and size (i.e., area in the F1/F2 space) of VPSs that were categorized either into /a/, /i/, or /u/ were calculated for each LL and TA group. All center and size calculations were weighted by the goodness rating of each stimulus. The F1 and F2 values of the vowel category (VC) centers differed significantly by LL and TA. These effects were qualitatively different for the three vowel categories: English listeners had different /a/ and /u/ centers than Greek and Korean listeners. The size of VPSs did not differ significantly by LL, but did differ by TA and VCs: Greek and Korean listeners had larger vowel spaces when perceiving vowels produced by 2-year-olds than by 5-year-olds or adults, and English listeners had larger vowel spaces for /a/ than /i/ or /u/. Findings indicate that vowel perceptual categories of listeners varied by the nature of their native vowel system, and were sensitive to TA.

Conceptual rather than perceptual similarity enables generalization across perceptually different appearances of familiarized faces

Face recognition is a challenging categorization task, as in many cases the variability between different images of the same identity may be larger than the variability between images of different identities. Nevertheless, humans excel in this task, in particular for faces they are familiar with. What type of learning and what is the nature of the representation of the learned identity that support such remarkable categorization ability? Here we propose that conceptual learning and the generation of a conceptual representation of the learned identity in memory enables this classification performance. First, we show that humans learn to link perceptually different faces to the same identity, if faces are learned with the same conceptual information. Next, we show that this conceptual learning does not generate a single perceptual representation of the different appearances of each identity. Instead, perceptually dissimilar images of the same identity remain separated in the perceptual space and are linked conceptually rather than perceptually. This conceptual representation of face identity is advantageous, as it enables generalization across perceptually dissimilar images of the same identity/category, without increasing false recognition of perceptually similar images of different identities. A similar conceptual mechanism may also apply to other familiar categories such as familiar voices or objects of expertise that involve fine discrimination of a homogenous sets of stimuli that are linked to unique conceptual information. Overall these findings highlight the importance of studying the contribution of both cognition and perception to face recognition.

СПЕЦИФИКА ФОРМИРОВАНИЯ ПЕРЦЕПТУАЛЬНОГО ПРОСТРАНСТВА И ВРЕМЕНИ В РАССКАЗЕ И. С. ТУРГЕНЕВА «СОН»

В статье рассматривается специфика формирования перцептуального пространства и времени в рассказе И. С. Тургенева «Сон». Автор доказывает, что специфика обусловлена присутствием в произведении категории фантастического и особого типа личности главного героя, который является носителем фантастического (таинственные сны). Установлено, что пространственно-временные искажения перцептуальной сферы происходят в его сознании и подсознании. В ходе анализа выявлено, что сфера перцептуального пространства-времени сначала расширяется (фантастический сон - сон-галлюцинация - сон наяву), а потом органично включается в реальную действительность. Подчеркивается особая значимость сна-галлюцинации, который активизирует динамику последующего событийного ряда.The article discusses the formation of perceptual space and time in the story of I. S. Turgenev «Dream». The author proves that the specificity is due to the presence of the category of fantastic in the work and a special type of personality of the main character, who is the bearer of the fantastic (mysterious dreams). It has been established that the spatio-temporal distortions of the perceptual sphere occur in the consciousness and subconscious of the protagonist. The analysis revealed that the sphere of perceptual space-time first expands (a fantastic dream - a dream-hallucination - a dream in reality), and then it is naturally included in reality. The author stresses the significance of sleep-hallucination which activates the dynamics of the subsequent series of events.