Linguistic and prosodic aspects of child-directed speech: The role of maternal child-rearing experiences

This study explored if the quality of mothers’ reported child-rearing experiences influences the prosodic and linguistic features of maternal child-directed speech. Lexical, syntactic, functional and prosodic aspects of maternal speech directed towards their 24-month-old children were examined. Results showed that mothers with different child-rearing histories differed in the ways they talked to their children. Mothers who recalled the caregiving they received during childhood as characterized by high levels of care and low levels of control, used a lexically and syntactically more complex speech and expressed more positive emotions. This kind of input seems to be more attuned with the typical growing skills of two-year-old children. Implications for the study of mother–infant relationship as well as for the study of child language development are addressed.     

言语想象的神经机制

言语想象不仅在大脑预处理机制方面起到重要的作用,还是目前脑机接口领域研究的热点。与正常言语产生过程相比,言语想象的理论模型、激活脑区、神经传导路径等均与其有较多相似之处。而言语障碍群体的言语想象、想象有意义的词语和句子时的脑神经机制与正常言语产生存在差异。鉴于人类言语系统的复杂性,言语想象的神经机制研究还面临一系列挑战,未来研究可在言语想象质量评价工具及神经解码范式、脑控制回路、激活通路、言语障碍群体的言语想象机制、词语和句子想象的脑神经信号等方面进一步探索,为有效提高脑机接口的识别率提供依据,为言语障碍群体的沟通提供便利。     

婴儿期母语音位范畴习得：来自言语知觉的证据

婴儿期言语知觉研究表明婴儿最初（1~4个月）可以分辨几乎所有的语音范畴对比;随母语经验增加,婴儿言语知觉逐渐表现出母语语音特征的影响,辅音知觉表现为对母语语音范畴界限敏感性的提高和对非母语范畴界限敏感性的下降,非母语范畴开始同化到母语音系中去,母语元音知觉表现出知觉磁体效应。这些证据表明婴儿逐渐习得母语音位范畴,音位范畴习得顺序可能依赖范畴例子本身的声学特征、发生频率等因素     

Demystifying infant vocal imitation: The roles of mouth looking and speaker’s gaze

Vocal imitation plays a fundamental role in human language acquisition from infancy. Little is known, however, about how infants imitate other's sounds. We focused on three factors: (a) whether infants receive information from upright faces, (b) the infant's observation of the speaker's mouth and (c) the speaker directing their gaze towards the infant. We recorded the eye movements of 6‐month‐olds who participated in experiments watching videos of a speaker producing vowel sounds. We found that an infants’ tendency to vocally imitate such videos increased as a function of (a) seeing upright rather than inverted faces, (b) their increased looking towards the speaker's mouth and (c) whether the speaker directed their gaze towards, rather than away from infants. These latter findings are consistent with theories of motor resonance and natural pedagogy respectively. New light has been shed on the cues and underlying mechanisms linking infant speech perception and production.     

Bilingual infants excel at foreign‐language talker recognition

Bilingual and monolingual infants differ in how they process linguistic aspects of the speech signal. But do they also differ in how they process non‐linguistic aspects of speech, such as who is talking? Here, we addressed this question by testing Canadian monolingual and bilingual 9‐month‐olds on their ability to learn to identify native Spanish‐speaking females in a face‐voice matching task. Importantly, neither group was familiar with Spanish prior to participating in the study. In line with our predictions, bilinguals succeeded in learning the face‐voice pairings, whereas monolinguals did not. We consider multiple explanations for this finding, including the possibility that simultaneous bilingualism enhances perceptual attentiveness to talker‐specific speech cues in infancy (even in unfamiliar languages), and that early bilingualism delays perceptual narrowing to language‐specific talker recognition cues. This work represents the first evidence that multilingualism in infancy affects the processing of non‐linguistic aspects of the speech signal, such as talker identity.     

Inside bilingualism: Language background modulates selective attention to a talker's mouth

Previous findings indicate that bilingual Catalan/Spanish‐learning infants attend more to the highly salient audiovisual redundancy cues normally available in a talker's mouth than do monolingual infants. Presumably, greater attention to such cues renders the challenge of learning two languages easier. Spanish and Catalan are, however, rhythmically and phonologically close languages. This raises the possibility that bilinguals only rely on redundant audiovisual cues when their languages are close. To test this possibility, we exposed 15‐month‐old and 4‐ to 6‐year‐old close‐language bilinguals (Spanish/Catalan) and distant‐language bilinguals (Spanish/”other”) to videos of a talker uttering Spanish or Catalan (native) and English (non‐native) monologues and recorded eye‐gaze to the talker's eyes and mouth. At both ages, the close‐language bilinguals attended more to the talker's mouth than the distant‐language bilinguals. This indicates that language proximity modulates selective attention to a talker's mouth during early childhood and suggests that reliance on the greater salience of audiovisual speech cues depends on the difficulty of the speech‐processing task.     

Specific effects of the Trier Social Stress Test on speech fluency in young and older adults

The notion that speech becomes less fluent during stressful speaking conditions has received little empirical test, and no research has tested this relationship in older adult participants. We analyzed speeches produced during the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) or during a less stressful placebo (pTSST) version of the task. We measured young and older adults’ speech fillers (e.g., um), unfilled pauses (at least 1 s in duration), and other disfluencies (e.g., repetitions, repairs). Neither young nor older adult participants rated themselves as having greater stress in the TSST than pTSST condition, but behavioral effects were obtained. Participants in the TSST condition produced more mid-phrase speech fillers and unfilled pauses than participants in the pTSST condition. Young adults produced more unfilled pauses than older adults overall, and older adults produced more mid-phrase fillers than young adults. Critically, age group interacted with experimental condition, such that older speakers produced disproportionately more mid-phrase fillers than young adults in the TSST compared to the pTSST condition. In sum, the negative effects of the TSST on fluency were generally similar across age, but this specific age-related increase in mid-phrase fillers indicates that older adults’ word retrieval may have been particularly negatively affected. Findings are generally consistent with previous research and add to understanding of how factors internal to the speaker (i.e., demographic, personality, and cognitive variables) and factors external to the speaker (i.e., variables regarding the situation, context, or content of speech) combine to affect speech fluency.     

语言加工过程中的视听跨通道整合

日常生活中, 语言的使用往往出现在某个视觉情境里。大量认知科学研究表明, 视觉信息与语言信息加工模块并不是独立工作, 而是存在复杂的交互作用。本文以视觉信息对语言加工的影响为主线, 首先对视觉信息影响言语理解, 言语产生以及言语交流的相关研究进展进行了综述。其次, 重点对视觉信息影响语言加工的机制进行了探讨。最后介绍了关于视觉信息影响语言加工的计算模型, 并对未来的研究方向提出了展望。     

Increased discriminability of authenticity from multimodal laughter is driven by auditory information

We present an investigation of the perception of authenticity in audiovisual laughter, in which we contrast spontaneous and volitional samples and examine the contributions of unimodal affective information to multimodal percepts. In a pilot study, we demonstrate that listeners perceive spontaneous laughs as more authentic than volitional ones, both in unimodal (audio-only, visual-only) and multimodal contexts (audiovisual). In the main experiment, we show that the discriminability of volitional and spontaneous laughter is enhanced for multimodal laughter. Analyses of relationships between affective ratings and the perception of authenticity show that, while both unimodal percepts significantly predict evaluations of audiovisual laughter, it is auditory affective cues that have the greater influence on multimodal percepts. We discuss differences and potential mismatches in emotion signalling through voices and faces, in the context of spontaneous and volitional behaviour, and highlight issues that should be addressed in future studies of dynamic multimodal emotion processing.