Ramus, Franck (2002) Language discrimination by newborns: Teasing apart phonotactic, rhythmic, and intonational cues. [Journal (On-line/Unpaginated)] (In Press)
This is the latest version of this eprint.
Full text available as:
PDF
129Kb |
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.
Item Type: | Journal (On-line/Unpaginated) |
---|---|
Keywords: | newborn speech perception language discrimination rhythm prosody bootstrapping |
Subjects: | Psychology > Cognitive Psychology Psychology > Developmental Psychology Linguistics > Phonology Psychology > Perceptual Cognitive Psychology Psychology > Psycholinguistics |
ID Code: | 2274 |
Deposited By: | Ramus, Dr Franck |
Deposited On: | 12 Jun 2002 |
Last Modified: | 11 Mar 2011 08:54 |
Available Versions of this Item
-
Perception of linguistic rhythm by newborn infants. (deposited 17 Jul 2000)
- Language discrimination by newborns: Teasing apart phonotactic, rhythmic, and intonational cues. (deposited 12 Jun 2002) [Currently Displayed]
References in Article
Select the SEEK icon to attempt to find the referenced article. If it does not appear to be in cogprints you will be forwarded to the paracite service. Poorly formated references will probably not work.
Metadata
- ASCII Citation
- Atom
- BibTeX
- Dublin Core
- EP3 XML
- EPrints Application Profile (experimental)
- EndNote
- HTML Citation
- ID Plus Text Citation
- JSON
- METS
- MODS
- MPEG-21 DIDL
- OpenURL ContextObject
- OpenURL ContextObject in Span
- RDF+N-Triples
- RDF+N3
- RDF+XML
- Refer
- Reference Manager
- Search Data Dump
- Simple Metadata
- YAML
Repository Staff Only: item control page