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The Development of Tone Discrimination in Infancy: Evidence from a Cross-Linguistic, Multi-Lab Report
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Marina Kalashnikova; Leher Singh; Angeline Tsui; Eylem Altuntas; Denis Burnham; Ryan Cannistraci; Ng Bee Chin; Ye Feng; Laura Fernández-Merino; Antonia Götz; Lisa Gustavsson; Jessica Hay; Barbara Höhle; René Kager; Regine Lai; Liquan Liu; Ellen Marklund; Thierry Nazzi; Daniela Santos Oliveira; Anne Marte Haug Olstad; Anthony Picaud; Iris-Corinna Schwarz; Feng-Ming Tsao; Patrick C. M. Wong; Pei Jun Woo – Developmental Science, 2024
We report the findings of a multi-language and multi-lab investigation of young infants' ability to discriminate lexical tones as a function of their native language, age and language experience, as well as of tone properties. Given the high prevalence of lexical tones across human languages, understanding lexical tone acquisition is fundamental…
Descriptors: Auditory Discrimination, Infants, Monolingualism, Bilingualism
How Infants Link Nonce Phrases to Scenes with Objects and Predicates
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Angelica Buerkin-Pontrelli; Daniel Swingley – Developmental Science, 2025
When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity,…
Descriptors: Infants, Phrase Structure, Verbs, Language Acquisition
When Infants Talk, Infants Listen: Pre-Babbling Infants Prefer Listening to Speech with Infant Vocal Properties
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Masapollo, Matthew; Polka, Linda; Ménard, Lucie – Developmental Science, 2016
To learn to produce speech, infants must effectively monitor and assess their own speech output. Yet very little is known about how infants perceive speech produced by an infant, which has higher voice pitch and formant frequencies compared to adult or child speech. Here, we tested whether pre-babbling infants (at 4-6 months) prefer listening to…
Descriptors: Infants, Listening, Speech Communication, Oral Language
Influences of Vowel and Tone Variation on Emergent Word Knowledge: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation
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Singh, Leher; Hui, Tam Jun; Chan, Calista; Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick – Developmental Science, 2014
To learn words, infants must be sensitive to native phonological contrast. While lexical tone predominates as a source of phonemic contrast in human languages, there has been little investigation of the influences of lexical tone on word learning. The present study investigates infants' sensitivity to tone mispronunciations in two groups of…
Descriptors: Vowels, Intonation, Infants, Phonemics
Tuned to the Signal: The Privileged Status of Speech for Young Infants
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Vouloumanos, Athena; Werker, Janet F. – Developmental Science, 2004
Do young infants treat speech as a special signal, compared with structurally similar non-speech sounds? We presented 2- to 7-month-old infants with nonsense speech sounds and complex non-speech analogues. The non-speech analogues retain many of the spectral and temporal properties of the speech signal, including the pitch contour information…
Descriptors: Infants, Speech Communication, Intonation, Auditory Perception
Long-Term Memory for Music: Infants Remember Tempo and Timbre
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Trainor, Laurel J.; Wu, Luann; Tsang, Christine D. – Developmental Science, 2004
We show that infants' long-term memory representations for melodies are not just reduced to the structural features of relative pitches and durations, but contain surface or performance tempo- and timbre-specific information. Using a head turn preference procedure, we found that after a one week exposure to an old English folk song, infants…
Descriptors: Music, Singing, Infants, Long Term Memory
Changing the Tune: The Structure of the Input Affects Infants' Use of Absolute and Relative Pitch
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Saffran, Jenny R.; Reeck, Karelyn; Niebuhr, Aimee; Wilson, Diana – Developmental Science, 2005
Sequences of notes contain several different types of pitch cues, including both absolute and relative pitch information. What factors determine which of these cues are used when learning about tone sequences? Previous research suggests that infants tend to preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, while other…
Descriptors: Cues, Infants, Learning Processes, Intonation