Cognitive influences on cross-language speech perception in infancy

Previous research has shown that young infants can discriminate both native and nonnative phonetic contrasts with ease. By 10 to 12 months of age, however, infants—like adults—typically have difficulty discriminating consonant contrasts that are not used to distinguish meaning in their native language. Although the timing of this change in speech perception has been firmly established, little is currently known about the processes or mechanisms involved in this selective and adaptive reorganization in nonnative phonetic discrimination. This study was designed to determine if there is a relation between age-related changes in speech perception performance and other developing cognitive abilities. A total of 40 8- to 10-month-old infants were tested on a nonnative consonant discrimination task and then on two additional tasks (a visual categorization task and an object search task) in an attempt to determine whether changes in nonnative consonant perception coincide with changes in these other areas of cognitive/perceptual functioning. The results indicate that changes in task performance occur in synchrony across all three tasks, and that this synchrony is not explained by simple age effects. These findings suggest that domain-general cognitive/perceptual competencies may influence developmental changes in speech perception by the end of the 1st year of life.     

The development of infants' preference for motherese

Generally, infants prefer infant-directed (ID) to adult-directed (AD) speech. Mostly, researchers have used unfamiliar female voices in these studies. We investigated preferences for maternal ID speech in 1- and 4-month-olds. Using a procedure in which infants controlled access to voices by fixating a visual display, infants listened to recordings of natural female ID and AD speech. In Experiment 1, 1-month-olds heard recordings of maternal ID and AD speech, but these infants showed no preference for maternal ID speech. In Experiment 2, 1-month-olds heard the same ID and AD speech tapes but were not familiar with the speakers. Contrary to Experiment 1, these infants preferred ID speech. In Experiment 3, 4-month-olds heard recordings of maternal ID and AD speech and showed a significant preference for ID speech. Collectively, these results suggest that infant attention to ID speech depends on both speaker-general and speaker-specific characteristics, with interesting developmental changes occuring during early infancy.     

节律在听觉言语理解中的作用

言语理解是听者接受外部语音输入并且获得意义的心理过程。日常交流中,听觉言语理解受多尺度节律信息的影响,常见有韵律结构节律、语境节律、和说话者身体语言节律三方面外部节律。它们改变听者在言语理解中的音素判别、词汇感知以及言语可懂度等过程。内部节律表现为大脑内神经振荡,其能够表征外部言语输入在不同时间尺度下的层级特征。外部节律性刺激与内部神经活动的神经夹带能够优化大脑对言语刺激的处理,并受到听者自上而下的认知过程的调节进一步增强目标言语的内在表征。我们认为它可能是实现内外节律相互联系并共同影响言语理解的关键机制。对内外节律及其联系机制的揭示能够为理解言语这种在多层级时间尺度上具有结构规律的复杂序列提供了一个研究窗口。     

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。     

Public discourse and the myth of religious speech

Critics of public religious speech have proposed various strategies for limiting the presence of religion in the public square, while proponents of public religious speech argue that such limitations constitute an infringement of the freedom of speech. For theoretical, practical, and ethical reasons, I argue for dismissing the category of ‘religious speech’, which rests on the erroneous assumption of a clear distinction between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. ‘Religious speech’ should be regarded no differently from any other kind of speech; it therefore ought not to be subject to either special limitations or protections. Regarding religious speech as nothing other than free speech ensures the right of religious citizens publicly to express their views, while simultaneously preserving the right of other citizens to provide a critique to arguments that are framed in religious terms.     

The varieties of inner speech: links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults

A resurgence of interest in inner speech as a core feature of human experience has not yet coincided with methodological progress in the empirical study of the phenomenon. The present article reports the development and psychometric validation of a novel instrument, the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire (VISQ), designed to assess the phenomenological properties of inner speech along dimensions of dialogicality, condensed/expanded quality, evaluative/motivational nature, and the extent to which inner speech incorporates other people’s voices. In response to findings that some forms of psychopathology may relate to inner speech, anxiety, depression, and proneness to auditory and visual hallucinations were also assessed. Anxiety, but not depression, was found to be uniquely positively related to both evaluative/motivational inner speech and the presence of other voices in inner speech. Only dialogic inner speech predicted auditory hallucination-proneness, with no inner speech variables predicting levels of visual hallucinations/disturbances. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Suprasegmental lexical stress cues in visual speech can guide spoken-word recognition

Visual cues to the individual segments of speech and to sentence prosody guide speech recognition. The present study tested whether visual suprasegmental cues to the stress patterns of words can also constrain recognition. Dutch listeners use acoustic suprasegmental cues to lexical stress (changes in duration, amplitude, and pitch) in spoken-word recognition. We asked here whether they can also use visual suprasegmental cues. In two categorization experiments, Dutch participants saw a speaker say fragments of word pairs that were segmentally identical but differed in their stress realization (e.g., ?ca-vi from cavia “guinea pig” vs. ?ka-vi from kaviaar “caviar”). Participants were able to distinguish between these pairs from seeing a speaker alone. Only the presence of primary stress in the fragment, not its absence, was informative. Participants were able to distinguish visually primary from secondary stress on first syllables, but only when the fragment-bearing target word carried phrase-level emphasis. Furthermore, participants distinguished fragments with primary stress on their second syllable from those with secondary stress on their first syllable (e.g., pro-?jec from projector “projector” vs. ?pro-jec from projectiel “projectile”), independently of phrase-level emphasis. Seeing a speaker thus contributes to spoken-word recognition by providing suprasegmental information about the presence of primary lexical stress.     

Foreign accents reduce false recognition rates in the DRM paradigm

ABSTRACT

More cognitive resources are required to comprehend foreign-accented than native speech. Focusing these cognitive resources on resolving the acoustic mismatch between the foreign-accented input and listeners’ stored representations of spoken words can affect other cognitive processes. Across two studies, we explored whether processing foreign-accented speech reduces the activation of semantic information. This was achieved using the DRM paradigm, in which participants study word lists and typically falsely remember non-studied words (i.e. critical lures) semantically associated with the studied words. In two experiments, participants were presented with word lists spoken both by a native and a foreign-accented speaker. In both experiments we observed lower false recognition rates for the critical lures associated with word lists presented in a foreign accent, compared to native speech. In addition, participants freely recalled more studied words when they had been presented in a native, compared to a foreign, accent, although this difference only emerged in Experiment 2, where the foreign speaker had a very strong accent. These observations suggest that processing foreign-accented speech modulates the activation of semantic information.

Highlights

• The DRM paradigm was used to explore whether semantic activation is reduced when processing foreign-accented speech.

• Across two experiments, false recognition of non-studied semantic associates was lower when word lists were presented in a foreign accent, compared to native speech.

• The above results suggest semantic activation may be reduced when processing foreign-accented speech.

• Additionally, it was found that when the foreign speaker had a mild accent, correct recall of studied words was uninfluenced. If the foreign speaker had a strong accent, however, correct recall of studied words was reduced.