Sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infancy and vocabulary development at 3 years: A significant relationship

Here we report, for the first time, a relationship between sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infants and their later vocabulary development. Recent research in auditory neuroscience has revealed that amplitude envelope rise time plays a mechanistic role in speech encoding. Accordingly, individual differences in infant discrimination of amplitude envelope rise times could be expected to relate to individual differences in language acquisition. A group of 50 infants taking part in a longitudinal study contributed rise time discrimination thresholds when aged 7 and 10 months, and their vocabulary development was measured at 3 years. Experimental measures of phonological sensitivity were also administered at 3 years. Linear mixed effect models taking rise time sensitivity as the dependent variable, and controlling for non‐verbal IQ, showed significant predictive effects for vocabulary at 3 years, but not for the phonological sensitivity measures. The significant longitudinal relationship between amplitude envelope rise time discrimination and vocabulary development suggests that early rise time discrimination abilities have an impact on speech processing by infants.     

Fresh Expressions of Church and the Mixed Economy

The term “fresh expressions of church” has been used since 2004 in the Church of England to refer to small contextual churches that start alongside but aim to be different to parish churches. What is characteristic of a fresh expression of church is not its newness, but its ability to pass on and contextualize inherited theology, ecclesiology, tradition, and spiritual experience. The ecclesiology of fresh expressions of church can be summarized as a dialogical‐relational ecclesiology that is focused on a theological centre. There may be around 2,100 of them in the Church of England, both urban and rural. During the past 15 years, the self‐understanding of the Church of England, a traditional state church with its parish structure, has changed. The mother church of the Anglican World Communion claims since 2008 to be a mixed‐economy church: one that supports and recognizes innovative ecclesial spaces (fresh expressions of church) as church, as well as parish churches. It is the goal to have an innovative diversity of churches in a pluralistic society. At the same time, these churches should be recognizable and contextual. It is the concept of the mixed economy that manages a fair cooperation between parochial and fresh expressions of church. In the meantime, the concept of mixed economy is received not only in the UK, but in different national and free churches in continental Europe, the US, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. Lately, the concept has been taken up by the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE).     

Teaching mands for information using speech generating devices: A replication and extension

Approximately 30% of individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) fail to develop vocal communication and, therefore, use some form of augmentative or alternative communication system. The current study replicates and extends previous research on teaching “Who?” and “Which?” mands for information to 3 young children diagnosed with ASD using a speech generating device. Procedures were evaluated using a multiple baseline across participants design. All participants learned to mand for information and, subsequently, used the information to access preferred items.     

Infant-adult vocal interaction dynamics depend on infant vocal type,child-directedness of adult speech,and timeframe

This study explored the temporal contingencies between infant and adult vocalizations as a function of the type of infant vocalization, whether adult caregivers’ vocalizations were infant-directed or other-directed, and the timescale of analysis. We analyzed excerpts taken from day-long home audio recordings that were collected from nineteen 12- to 13-month-old American infants and their caregivers using the LENA system. Three 5-minute sections having high child vocalization rates were identified within each recording and coded by trained researchers. Infant and adult vocalizations were sequenced and defined as contingent if they occurred within 1 s, 2 s, or 5 s of each other. When using 1 s or 2 s definitions of temporal adjacency, infant vocalizations generally predicted subsequent infant-directed adult vocalizations. A reflexive vocalization (i.e. a cry or a laugh) was the strongest predictor. Likewise, within 1–2 s timeframes, infant-directed adult speech generally predicted infant vocalizations with reflexive vocalizations being particularly predictive. Infant vocalizations predicted fewer subsequent other-directed adult vocalizations and were less likely following other-directed adult vocalizations when considering up to 5 s lags. This suggests an understudied communicative role for infants of non-infant-directed adult speech. These results demonstrate the importance of timescale in studying infant-adult interactions, support the communicative significance of reflexive infant vocalizations and other-directed adult speech in addition to more commonly studied vocalization types, and highlight the challenges of determining direction(s) of influence when using only two-event sequences.     

McGurk效应的影响因素与神经基础

McGurk效应(麦格克效应)是典型的视听整合现象, 该效应受到刺激的物理特征、注意分配、个体视听信息依赖程度、视听整合能力、语言文化差异的影响。引发McGurk效应的关键视觉信息主要来自说话者的嘴部区域。产生McGurk效应的认知过程包含早期的视听整合(与颞上皮层有关)以及晚期的视听不一致冲突(与额下皮层有关)。未来研究应关注面孔社会信息对McGurk效应的影响, McGurk效应中单通道信息加工与视听整合的关系, 结合计算模型探讨其认知神经机制等。     

The effects of autonomy-supportive versus controlling environments on self-talk

Based within a self-determination theory framework (SDT: Deci and Ryan, Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behaviour. Plenum Publishing Co., New York, 1985), the present study examined the effects of manipulating social-contextual conditions on the content of individuals’ self-talk. Seventy student volunteers were randomly assigned to a controlling or autonomy-supportive experimental condition. Participants were instructed to ‘think-aloud’ throughout a 10-min computerized task during which self-verbalizations were recorded. Audio recordings were transcribed verbatim, and then analysed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Program (LIWC; Pennebaker et al., LIWC2001; Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (software and manual). Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 2001). Inductive content analyses were also conducted. Triangulation of the quantitative and qualitative findings revealed that in the autonomy-supportive condition, individuals’ self-talk was more informational and less controlling, with participants using more positive emotional words and assents, and fewer negative emotional words, swear words, and first person references than in the controlling condition. The findings suggest that social-context can affect cognitive factors such as self-talk and further support the promotion of autonomy-supportive environments.     

非言语声音影响汉语听者言语声音的知觉

采用启动范式, 以汉语听者为被试, 考察了非言语声音是否影响言语声音的知觉。实验1考察了纯音对辅音范畴连续体知觉的影响, 结果发现纯音影响到辅音范畴连续体的知觉, 表现出频谱对比效应。实验2考察了纯音和复合音对元音知觉的影响, 结果发现与元音共振峰频率一致的纯音或复合音加快了元音的识别, 表现出启动效应。两个实验一致发现非言语声音能够影响言语声音的知觉, 表明言语声音知觉也需要一个前言语的频谱特征分析阶段, 这与言语知觉听觉理论的观点一致。     

Influences of high and low variability on infant word recognition

Although infants begin to encode and track novel words in fluent speech by 7.5 months, their ability to recognize words is somewhat limited at this stage. In particular, when the surface form of a word is altered, by changing the gender or affective prosody of the speaker, infants begin to falter at spoken word recognition. Given that natural speech is replete with variability, only some of which determines the meaning of a word, it remains unclear how infants might ever overcome the effects of surface variability without appealing to meaning. In the current set of experiments, consequences of high and low variability are examined in preverbal infants. The source of variability, vocal affect, is a common property of infant-directed speech with which young learners have to contend. Across a series of four experiments, infants' abilities to recognize repeated encounters of words, as well as to reject similar-sounding words, are investigated in the context of high and low affective variation. Results point to positive consequences of affective variation, both in creating generalizable memory representations for words, but also in establishing phonologically precise memories for words. Conversely, low variability appears to degrade word recognition on both fronts, compromising infants' abilities to generalize across different affective forms of a word and to detect similar-sounding items. Findings are discussed in the context of principles of categorization that may potentiate the early growth of a lexicon.     

Perceptual adaptation to non-native speech

This study investigated talker-dependent and talker-independent perceptual adaptation to foreign-accent English. Experiment 1 investigated talker-dependent adaptation by comparing native English listeners' recognition accuracy for Chinese-accented English across single and multiple talker presentation conditions. Results showed that the native listeners adapted to the foreign-accented speech over the course of the single talker presentation condition with some variation in the rate and extent of this adaptation depending on the baseline sentence intelligibility of the foreign-accented talker. Experiment 2 investigated talker-independent perceptual adaptation to Chinese-accented English by exposing native English listeners to Chinese-accented English and then testing their perception of English produced by a novel Chinese-accented talker. Results showed that, if exposed to multiple talkers of Chinese-accented English during training, native English listeners could achieve talker-independent adaptation to Chinese-accented English. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for highly flexible speech perception processes that can adapt to speech that deviates substantially from the pronunciation norms in the native talker community along multiple acoustic-phonetic dimensions.     

Rapid acquisition of phonological alternations by infants

We explore whether infants can learn novel phonological alternations on the basis of distributional information. In Experiment 1, two groups of 12-month-old infants were familiarized with artificial languages whose distributional properties exhibited either stop or fricative voicing alternations. At test, infants in the two exposure groups had different preferences for novel sequences involving voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives, suggesting that each group had internalized a different familiarization alternation. In Experiment 2, 8.5-month-olds exhibited the same patterns of preference. In Experiments 3 and 4, we investigated whether infants' preferences were driven solely by preferences for sequences of high transitional probability. Although 8.5-month-olds in Experiment 3 were sensitive to the relative probabilities of sequences in the familiarization stimuli, only 12-month-olds in Experiment 4 showed evidence of having grouped alternating segments into a single functional category. Taken together, these results suggest a developmental trajectory for the acquisition of phonological alternations using distributional cues in the input.