RESUMEN

Growing evidence shows that early speech processing relies on information extracted from speech production. In particular, production skills are linked to word-form processing, as more advanced producers prefer listening to pseudowords containing consonants they do not yet produce. However, it is unclear whether production affects word-form encoding (the translation of perceived phonological information into a memory trace) and/or recognition (the automatic retrieval of a stored item). Distinguishing recognition from encoding makes it possible to explore whether sensorimotor information is stored in long-term phonological representations (and thus, retrieved during recognition) or is processed when encoding a new item, but not necessarily when retrieving a stored item. In this study, we asked whether speech-related sensorimotor information is retained in long-term representations of word-forms. To this aim, we tested the effect of production on the recognition of ecologically learned, real familiar word-forms. Testing these items allowed to assess the effect of sensorimotor information in a context in which encoding did not happen during testing itself. Two groups of French-learning monolinguals (11- and 14-month-olds) participated in the study. Using the Headturn Preference Procedure, each group heard two lists, each containing 10 familiar word-forms composed of either early-learned consonants (commonly produced by French-learners at these ages) or late-learned consonants (more rarely produced at these ages). We hypothesized differences in listening preferences as a function of word-list and/or production skills. At both 11 and 14 months, babbling skills modulated orientation times to the word-lists containing late-learned consonants. This specific effect establishes that speech production impacts familiar word-form recognition by 11 months, suggesting that sensorimotor information is retained in long-term word-form representations and accessed during word-form processing.

RESUMEN

The influence of motor knowledge on speech perception is well established, but the functional role of the motor system is still poorly understood. The present study explores the hypothesis that speech production abilities may help infants discover phonetic categories in the speech stream, in spite of coarticulation effects. To this aim, we examined the influence of babbling abilities on consonant categorization in 6- and 9-month-old infants. Using an intersensory matching procedure, we investigated the infants' capacity to associate auditory information about a consonant in various vowel contexts with visual information about the same consonant, and to map auditory and visual information onto a common phoneme representation. Moreover, a parental questionnaire evaluated the infants' consonantal repertoire. In a first experiment using /b/-/d/ consonants, we found that infants who displayed babbling abilities and produced the /b/ and/or the /d/ consonants in repetitive sequences were able to correctly perform intersensory matching, while non-babblers were not. In a second experiment using the /v/-/z/ pair, which is as visually contrasted as the /b/-/d/ pair but which is usually not produced at the tested ages, no significant matching was observed, for any group of infants, babbling or not. These results demonstrate, for the first time, that the emergence of babbling could play a role in the extraction of vowel-independent representations for consonant place of articulation. They have important implications for speech perception theories, as they highlight the role of sensorimotor interactions in the development of phoneme representations during the first year of life.

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This study investigated the relationship between imitation and both the perception and production abilities of second language (L2) learners for two non-native contrasts differing in their expected degree of difficulty. German learners of English were tested on perceptual categorization, imitation and a word reading task for the difficult English /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast, which tends not to be well encoded in the learners' phonological inventories, and the easy, near-native /i/-/ɪ/ contrast. As expected, within-task comparisons between contrasts revealed more robust perception and better differentiation during production for /i/-/ɪ/ than /ɛ/-/æ/. Imitation also followed this pattern, suggesting that imitation is modulated by the phonological encoding of L2 categories. Moreover, learners' ability to imitate /ɛ/ and /æ/ was related to their perception of that contrast, confirming a tight perception-production link at the phonological level for difficult L2 sound contrasts. However, no relationship was observed between acoustic measures for imitated and read-aloud tokens of /ɛ/ and /æ/. This dissociation is mostly attributed to the influence of inaccurate non-native lexical representations in the word reading task. We conclude that imitation is strongly related to the phonological representation of L2 sound contrasts, but does not need to reflect the learners' productive usage of such non-native distinctions.

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Children adopted early in life into another linguistic community typically forget their birth language but retain, unaware, relevant linguistic knowledge that may facilitate (re)learning of birth-language patterns. Understanding the nature of this knowledge can shed light on how language is acquired. Here, international adoptees from Korea with Dutch as their current language, and matched Dutch-native controls, provided speech production data on a Korean consonantal distinction unlike any Dutch distinctions, at the outset and end of an intensive perceptual training. The productions, elicited in a repetition task, were identified and rated by Korean listeners. Adoptees' production scores improved significantly more across the training period than control participants' scores, and, for adoptees only, relative production success correlated significantly with the rate of learning in perception (which had, as predicted, also surpassed that of the controls). Of the adoptee group, half had been adopted at 17 months or older (when talking would have begun), while half had been prelinguistic (under six months). The former group, with production experience, showed no advantage over the group without. Thus the adoptees' retained knowledge of Korean transferred from perception to production and appears to be abstract in nature rather than dependent on the amount of experience.

RESUMEN

Previous studies have described the existence of a phonotactic bias called the Labial-Coronal (LC) bias, corresponding to a tendency to produce more words beginning with a labial consonant followed by a coronal consonant (i.e. "bat") than the opposite CL pattern (i.e. "tap"). This bias has initially been interpreted in terms of articulatory constraints of the human speech production system. However, more recently, it has been suggested that this presumably language-general LC bias in production might be accompanied by LC and CL biases in perception, acquired in infancy on the basis of the properties of the linguistic input. The present study investigates the origins of these perceptual biases, testing infants learning Japanese, a language that has been claimed to possess more CL than LC sequences, and comparing them with infants learning French, a language showing a clear LC bias in its lexicon. First, a corpus analysis of Japanese IDS and ADS revealed the existence of an overall LC bias, except for plosive sequences in ADS, which show a CL bias across counts. Second, speech preference experiments showed a perceptual preference for CL over LC plosive sequences (all recorded by a Japanese speaker) in 13- but not in 7- and 10-month-old Japanese-learning infants (Experiment 1), while revealing the emergence of an LC preference between 7 and 10 months in French-learning infants, using the exact same stimuli. These crosslinguistic behavioral differences, obtained with the same stimuli, thus reflect differences in processing in two populations of infants, which can be linked to differences in the properties of the lexicons of their respective native languages. These findings establish that the emergence of a CL/LC bias is related to exposure to a linguistic input.

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