Language discrimination by newborns: Teasing apart phonotactic, rhythmic, and intonational cues. Ramus, F. Ann Rev Lang Acqu, 2(1):85–115, 2002. abstract bibtex Speech rhythm has long been claimed to be a useful bootstrapping cue in the very first steps of language acquisition. Previous studies have suggested that newborn infants do categorize varieties of speech rhythm, as demonstrated by their ability to discriminate between certain languages. However, the existing evidence is not unequivocal: in previous studies, stimuli discriminated by newborns always contained additional speech cues on top of rhythm. Here, we conducted a series of experiments assessing discrimination between Dutch and Japanese by newborn infants, using a speech resynthesis technique to progressively degrade non-rhythmical properties of the sentences. When the stimuli are resynthesized using identical phonemes and artificial intonation contours for the two languages, thereby preserving only their rhythmic and broad phonotactic structure, newborns still seem to be able to discriminate between the two languages, but the effect is weaker than when intonation is present. This leaves open the possibility that the temporal correlation between intonational and rhythmic cues might actually facilitate the processing of speech rhythm.
@Article{Ramus2002,
author = {Ramus, Frank},
journal = {Ann Rev Lang Acqu},
title = {Language discrimination by newborns: Teasing apart phonotactic, rhythmic, and intonational cues},
year = {2002},
number = {1},
pages = {85--115},
volume = {2},
abstract = {Speech rhythm has long been claimed to be a useful bootstrapping cue
in the very first steps of language acquisition. Previous studies
have suggested that newborn infants do categorize varieties of speech
rhythm, as demonstrated by their ability to discriminate between
certain languages. However, the existing evidence is not unequivocal:
in previous studies, stimuli discriminated by newborns always contained
additional speech cues on top of rhythm. Here, we conducted a series
of experiments assessing discrimination between Dutch and Japanese
by newborn infants, using a speech resynthesis technique to progressively
degrade non-rhythmical properties of the sentences. When the stimuli
are resynthesized using identical phonemes and artificial intonation
contours for the two languages, thereby preserving only their rhythmic
and broad phonotactic structure, newborns still seem to be able to
discriminate between the two languages, but the effect is weaker
than when intonation is present. This leaves open the possibility
that the temporal correlation between intonational and rhythmic cues
might actually facilitate the processing of speech rhythm.},
}
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