The developmental course of lexical tone perception in the first year of life

Perceptual reorganisation of infants' speech perception has been found from 6 months for consonants and earlier for vowels. Recently, similar reorganisation has been found for lexical tone between 6 and 9 months of age. Given that there is a close relationship between vowels and tones, this study investigates whether the perceptual reorganisation for tone begins earlier than 6 months. Non-tone language English and French infants were tested with the Thai low vs. rising lexical tone contrast, using the stimulus alternating preference procedure. Four- and 6-month-old infants discriminated the lexical tones, and there was no decline in discrimination performance across these ages. However, 9-month-olds failed to discriminate the lexical tones. This particular pattern of decline in nonnative tone discrimination over age indicates that perceptual reorganisation for tone does not parallel the developmentally prior decline observed in vowel perception. The findings converge with previous developmental cross-language findings on tone perception in English-language infants [Mattock, K., & Burnham, D. (2006). Chinese and English infants' tone perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization. Infancy, 10(3)], and extend them by showing similar perceptual reorganisation for non-tone language infants learning rhythmically different non-tone languages (English and French).

[1]  D. Fry.  Duration and Intensity as Physical Correlates of Linguistic Stress , 1954 .

[2]  Thierry Nazzi,et al.  DISCRIMINATION OF PITCH CONTOURS BY NEONATES , 1998 .

[3]  L Polka,et al.  A cross-language comparison of /d/-/th/ perception: evidence for a new developmental pattern. , 2001, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[4]  P. Kuhl.  Learning and representation in speech and language , 1994, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[5]  S. Blumstein,et al.  Phonetic features and acoustic invariance in speech , 1981, Cognition.

[6]  Jeri J. Jaeger,et al.  Speech errors and the representation of tone in Mandarin Chinese , 1998, Phonology.

[7]  L. Trainor,et al.  Pitch characteristics of infant-directed speech affect infants’ ability to discriminate vowels , 2002, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[8]  J. Werker,et al.  Developmental changes across childhood in the perception of non-native speech sounds. , 1983, Canadian journal of psychology.

[9]  R A Harshman,et al.  Crosslanguage Differences in Tone Perception: a Multidimensional Scaling Investigation , 1978, Language and speech.

[10]  Gunnar Fant,et al.  PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY IN THE LAST 50 YEARS , 2004 .

[11]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Clauses are perceptual units for young infants , 1987, Cognition.

[12]  J. Werker,et al.  Developmental aspects of cross-language speech perception. , 1981, Child development.

[13]  Jack Gandour,et al.  On the Interaction between Tone and Vowel Length: Evidence from Thai Dialects , 1977 .

[14]  P. Kuhl,et al.  Speech perception in infancy predicts language development in the second year of life: a longitudinal study. , 2004, Child development.

[15]  J. Mehler,et al.  The periodicity bias , 1993 .

[16]  J. Werker,et al.  Developmental changes in perception of nonnative vowel contrasts. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[17]  J. Werker,et al.  The organization and reorganization of human speech perception. , 1992, Annual review of neuroscience.

[18]  Peter D. Eimas,et al.  Discrimination of information for manner of articulation , 1980 .

[19]  D. Burnham,et al.  Chinese and English Infants' Tone Perception: Evidence for Perceptual Reorganization , 2006 .

[20]  M.D. Mcclean,et al.  The Acoustic Parameters of Stress in Relation to Syllable Position, Speech Loudness and Rate , 1973, Language and speech.

[21]  K. Stevens,et al.  Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. , 1992, Science.

[22]  R. M. Dauer.  Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed. , 1983 .

[23]  D B Pisoni,et al.  Discrimination of voice onset time by human infants: new findings and implications for the effects of early experience. , 1981, Child development.

[24]  Karen Mattock,et al.  The perception of tones and phones. , 2007 .

[25]  W Jassem,et al.  Acoustic Correlates of Stress , 1965, Language and speech.

[26]  J. Pierrehumbert.  The phonetic grounding of phonology , 2000 .

[27]  R G Karzon,et al.  Syllabic pitch perception in 2- to 3-month-old infants , 1989, Perception & psychophysics.

[28]  A. Liberman,et al.  The Identification and Discrimination of Synthetic Vowels , 1962 .

[29]  A M Liberman,et al.  Perception of the speech code. , 1967, Psychological review.

[30]  P. Kuhl.  A new view of language acquisition. , 2000, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[31]  M. Yip.  Tone: African languages , 2002 .

[32]  P. D. Eimas,et al.  Speech Perception in Infants , 1971, Science.

[33]  S. Nooteboom,et al.  THE PROSODY OF SPEECH: MELODY AND RHYTHM , 2001 .

[34]  R G Karzon,et al.  Discrimination of polysyllabic sequences by one- to four-month-old infants. , 1985, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

[35]  L. Lisker,et al.  A Cross-Language Study of Voicing in Initial Stops: Acoustical Measurements , 1964 .

[36]  Peter Ladefoged.  WPP, No. 103: Phonetics and Phonology in the Last 50 Years , 2004 .

[37]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  The Sound Pattern of English , 1968 .

[38]  Peter D. Eimas,et al.  Auditory and linguistic processing of cues for place of articulation by infants , 1974 .

[39]  J. Goldsmith.  Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology , 1990 .

[40]  Yi Xu,et al.  Effects of tone and focus on the formation and alignment of f0contours , 1999 .

[41]  Y Xu,et al.  Consistency of Tone-Syllable Alignment across Different Syllable Structures and Speaking Rates , 1998, Phonetica.

[42]  Linda Polka,et al.  The Conditioned head turn procedure as a method for testing infant speech perception , 1997 .

[43]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants' preference for the predominant stress patterns of English words. , 1993, Child development.

[44]  P. Kuhl,et al.  Neural patterns to speech and vocabulary growth in American infants , 2005, Neuroreport.

[45]  F. Ramus,et al.  Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal , 1999, Cognition.

[46]  V. Fromkin,et al.  Tone : a linguistic survey , 1980 .

[47]  James L. Morgan,et al.  Signal to syntax : bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition , 1996 .

[48]  D. Burnham,et al.  Universality and specificity in infant-directed speech: Pitch modifications as a function of infant age and sex in a tonal and non-tonal language , 2001 .

[49]  D. Pisoni.  Auditory and phonetic memory codes in the discrimination of consonants and vowels , 1973, Perception & psychophysics.

[50]  P. Kuhl,et al.  Infants show a facilitation effect for native language phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months. , 2006, Developmental science.

[51]  D. Fry.  Experiments in the Perception of Stress , 1958 .

[52]  C. Best,et al.  Stimulus-alternation preference procedure to test infant speech discrimination , 1998 .

[53]  J. Werker,et al.  Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life , 1984 .