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Speech categorization develops slowly through adolescence.

ABSTRACT: The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be responsible for such development using a visual world paradigm experiment based on (McMurray, Tanenhaus, & Aslin, 2002). Children from 3 age groups (7-8, 12-13, and 17-18 years) heard a token from either a b/p or s/? continua spanning 2 words (beach/peach, ship/sip) and selected its referent from a screen containing 4 pictures of potential lexical candidates. Eye movements to each object were monitored as a measure of how strongly children were committing to each candidate as perception unfolds in real-time. Results showed an ongoing sharpening of speech categories through 18, which was particularly apparent during the early stages of real-time perception. When analysis targeted to specifically within-category sensitivity to continuous detail, children exhibited increasingly gradient categories over development, suggesting that increasing sensitivity to fine-grained detail in the signal enables these more discrete categorizations. Together these suggest that speech development is a protracted process in which children's increasing sensitivity to within-category detail in the signal enables increasingly sharp phonetic categories. (PsycINFO Database Record

SUBMITTER: McMurray B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6062449 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Speech categorization develops slowly through adolescence.

McMurray Bob B Danelz Ani A Rigler Hannah H Seedorff Michael M

Developmental psychology 20180628 8

The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be responsible for such development using a visual world paradigm experiment based on (McMurray, Tanenhaus, & Aslin, 2002). Children from 3 age groups (7-8, ...[more]

PMID: 29952600

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Project description:BackgroundThe association between brain regions involved in speech production and those that play a role in speech perception is not yet fully understood. We compared speech production related brain activity with activations resulting from perceptual categorization of syllables using high field 7 Tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 1-mm isotropic voxel resolution, enabling high localization accuracy compared to previous studies.MethodsBlood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signals were obtained in 20 normal hearing subjects using a simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) 7T echo-planar imaging (EPI) acquisition with whole-head coverage and 1 mm isotropic resolution. In a speech production localizer task, subjects were asked to produce a silent lip-round vowel /u/ in response to the visual cue "U" or purse their lips when they saw the cue "P". In a phoneme discrimination task, subjects were presented with pairs of syllables, which were equiprobably identical or different along an 8-step continuum between the prototypic /ba/ and /da/ sounds. After the presentation of each stimulus pair, the subjects were asked to indicate whether the two syllables they heard were identical or different by pressing one of two buttons. In a phoneme classification task, the subjects heard only one syllable and asked to indicate whether it was /ba/ or /da/.ResultsUnivariate fMRI analyses using a parametric modulation approach suggested that left motor, premotor, and frontal cortex BOLD activations correlate with phoneme category variability in the /ba/-/da/ discrimination task. In contrast, the variability related to acoustic features of the phonemes were the highest in the right primary auditory cortex. Our multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) suggested that left precentral/inferior frontal cortex areas, which were associated with speech production according to the localizer task, play a role also in perceptual categorization of the syllables.ConclusionsThe results support the hypothesis that articulatory motor networks in the left hemisphere that are activated during speech production could also have a role in perceptual categorization of syllables. Importantly, high voxel-resolution combined with advanced coil technology allowed us to pinpoint the exact brain regions involved in both perception and production tasks.

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Speech categorization develops slowly through adolescence.

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Speech categorization develops slowly through adolescence.

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