Vocalic Intrusions in Consonant Clusters in Child-Directed vs. Adult-Directed Speech.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Garmann NG
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8326906 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:ObjectivesCochlear implants (CIs) are remarkable in allowing individuals with severe to profound hearing loss to perceive speech. Despite these gains in speech understanding, however, CI users often struggle to perceive elements such as vocal emotion and prosody, as CIs are unable to transmit the spectro-temporal detail needed to decode affective cues. This issue becomes particularly important for children with CIs, but little is known about their emotional development. In a previous study, pediatric CI users showed deficits in voice emotion recognition with child-directed stimuli featuring exaggerated prosody. However, the large intersubject variability and differential developmental trajectory known in this population incited us to question the extent to which exaggerated prosody would facilitate performance in this task. Thus, the authors revisited the question with both adult-directed and child-directed stimuli.DesignVocal emotion recognition was measured using both child-directed (CDS) and adult-directed (ADS) speech conditions. Pediatric CI users, aged 7-19 years old, with no cognitive or visual impairments and who communicated through oral communication with English as the primary language participated in the experiment (n = 27). Stimuli comprised 12 sentences selected from the HINT database. The sentences were spoken by male and female talkers in a CDS or ADS manner, in each of the five target emotions (happy, sad, neutral, scared, and angry). The chosen sentences were semantically emotion-neutral. Percent correct emotion recognition scores were analyzed for each participant in each condition (CDS vs. ADS). Children also completed cognitive tests of nonverbal IQ and receptive vocabulary, while parents completed questionnaires of CI and hearing history. It was predicted that the reduced prosodic variations found in the ADS condition would result in lower vocal emotion recognition scores compared with the CDS condition. Moreover, it was hypothesized that cognitive factors, perceptual sensitivity to complex pitch changes, and elements of each child's hearing history may serve as predictors of performance on vocal emotion recognition.ResultsConsistent with our hypothesis, pediatric CI users scored higher on CDS compared with ADS speech stimuli, suggesting that speaking with an exaggerated prosody-akin to "motherese"-may be a viable way to convey emotional content. Significant talker effects were also observed in that higher scores were found for the female talker for both conditions. Multiple regression analysis showed that nonverbal IQ was a significant predictor of CDS emotion recognition scores while Years using CI was a significant predictor of ADS scores. Confusion matrix analyses revealed a dependence of results on specific emotions; for the CDS condition's female talker, participants had high sensitivity (d' scores) to happy and low sensitivity to the neutral sentences while for the ADS condition, low sensitivity was found for the scared sentences.ConclusionsIn general, participants had higher vocal emotion recognition to the CDS condition which also had more variability in pitch and intensity and thus more exaggerated prosody, in comparison to the ADS condition. Results suggest that pediatric CI users struggle with vocal emotion perception in general, particularly to adult-directed speech. The authors believe these results have broad implications for understanding how CI users perceive emotions both from an auditory communication standpoint and a socio-developmental perspective.
| S-EPMC8323060 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Humans speak to dogs using a special speech register called Pet-Directed Speech (PDS) which is very similar to Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) used by parents when talking to young infants. These two type of speech share prosodic features that are distinct from the typical Adult-Directed Speech (ADS): a high pitched voice and an increased pitch variation. So far, only one study has investigated the effect of PDS on dogs' attention. We video recorded 44 adult pet dogs and 19 puppies when listening to the same phrase enounced either in ADS or in PDS or in IDS. The phrases were previously recorded and were broadcasted via a loudspeaker placed in front of the dog. The total gaze duration of the dogs toward the loudspeaker, was used as a proxy of attention. Results show that adult dogs are significantly more attentive to PDS than to ADS and that their attention significantly increases along with the rise of the fundamental frequency of human' speech. It is likely that the exaggerated prosody of PDS is used by owners as an ostensive cue for dogs that facilitates the effectiveness of their communication, and should represent an evolutionarily determined adaptation that benefits the regulation and maintenance of their relationships.
| S-EPMC5504008 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Across languages, word frequency and rank follow a power law relation, forming a distribution known as the Zipfian distribution. There is growing experimental evidence that this well-studied phenomenon may be beneficial for language learning. However, most investigations of word distributions in natural language have focused on adult-to-adult speech: Zipf's law has not been thoroughly evaluated in child-directed speech (CDS) across languages. If Zipfian distributions facilitate learning, they should also be found in CDS. At the same time, several unique properties of CDS may result in a less skewed distribution. Here, we examine the frequency distribution of words in CDS in three studies. We first show that CDS is Zipfian across 15 languages from seven language families. We then show that CDS is Zipfian from early on (six-months) and across development for five languages with sufficient longitudinal data. Finally, we show that the distribution holds across different parts of speech: Nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions follow a Zipfian distribution. Together, the results show that the input children hear is skewed in a particular way from early on, providing necessary (but not sufficient) support for the postulated learning advantage of such skew. They highlight the need to study skewed learning environments experimentally.
| S-EPMC9987348 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Statistical distributions of phonetic variants in spoken language influence speech perception for both language learners and mature users. We theorized that patterns of phonetic variant processing of consonants demonstrated by adults might stem in part from patterns of early exposure to statistics of phonetic variants in infant-directed (ID) speech. In particular, we hypothesized that ID speech might involve greater proportions of canonical /t/ pronunciations compared to adult-directed (AD) speech in at least some phonological contexts. This possibility was tested using a corpus of spontaneous speech of mothers speaking to other adults, or to their typically-developing infant. Tokens of word-final alveolar stops - including /t/, /d/, and the nasal stop /n/ - were examined in assimilable contexts (i.e., those followed by a word-initial labial and/or velar); these were classified as canonical, assimilated, deleted, or glottalized. Results confirmed that there were significantly more canonical pronunciations in assimilable contexts in ID compared with AD speech, an effect which was driven by the phoneme /t/. These findings suggest that at least in phonological contexts involving possible assimilation, children are exposed to more canonical /t/ variant pronunciations than adults are. This raises the possibility that perceptual processing of canonical /t/ may be partly attributable to exposure to canonical /t/ variants in ID speech. Results support the need for further research into how statistics of variant pronunciations in early language input may shape speech processing across the lifespan.
| S-EPMC7467459 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Infant directed speech (IDS), the speech register adults use when talking to infants, has been shown to have positive effects on attracting infants' attention, language learning, and emotional communication. Here event related potentials (ERPs) are used to investigate the neural coding of IDS and ADS (adult directed speech) as well as their discrimination by both infants and adults. Two instances of the vowel /i/, one extracted from ADS and one from IDS, were presented to 9-month-old infants and adults in two oddball conditions: ADS standard/IDS deviant and IDS standard/ADS deviant. In Experiment 1 with adults, the obligatory ERPs that code acoustic information were different for ADS and IDS; and discrimination, indexed by mismatch negativity (MMN) responses, showed that IDS and ADS deviants were discriminated equally well; although, the P3a response was larger for IDS suggesting it captured adults' attention more than did ADS. In infants the obligatory responses did not differ for IDS and ADS, but for discrimination, while IDS deviants generated both a slow-positive mismatch response (MMR) as well as an adult-like MMN, the ADS deviants generated only an MMR. The presence of a mature adult-like MMN suggests that the IDS stimulus is easier to discriminate for infants.
| S-EPMC5039709 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A central challenge for articulatory speech synthesis is the simulation of realistic articulatory movements, which is critical for the generation of highly natural and intelligible speech. This includes modeling coarticulation, i.e., the context-dependent variation of the articulatory and acoustic realization of phonemes, especially of consonants. Here we propose a method to simulate the context-sensitive articulation of consonants in consonant-vowel syllables. To achieve this, the vocal tract target shape of a consonant in the context of a given vowel is derived as the weighted average of three measured and acoustically-optimized reference vocal tract shapes for that consonant in the context of the corner vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/. The weights are determined by mapping the target shape of the given context vowel into the vowel subspace spanned by the corner vowels. The model was applied for the synthesis of consonant-vowel syllables with the consonants /b/, /d/, /g/, /l/, /r/, /m/, /n/ in all combinations with the eight long German vowels. In a perception test, the mean recognition rate for the consonants in the isolated syllables was 82.4%. This demonstrates the potential of the approach for highly intelligible articulatory speech synthesis.
| S-EPMC3628899 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The way infants learn language is a highly complex adaptive behavior. This behavior chiefly relies on the ability to extract information from the speech they hear and combine it with information from the external environment. Most theories assume that this ability critically hinges on the recognition of at least some syntactic structure. Here, we show that child-directed speech allows for semantic inference without relying on explicit structural information. We simulate the process of semantic inference with machine learning applied to large text collections of two different types of speech, child-directed speech versus adult-directed speech. Taking the core meaning of causality as a test case, we find that in child-directed speech causal meaning can be successfully inferred from simple co-occurrences of neighboring words. By contrast, semantic inference in adult-directed speech fundamentally requires additional access to syntactic structure. These results suggest that child-directed speech is ideally shaped for a learner who has not yet mastered syntactic structure.
| S-EPMC8368066 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Child-directed speech, as a specialized form of speech directed toward young children, has been found across numerous languages around the world and has been suggested as a universal feature of human experience. However, variation in its implementation and the extent to which it is culturally supported has called its universality into question. Child-directed speech has also been posited to be associated with expression of positive affect or "happy talk." Here, we examined Canadian English-speaking adults' ability to discriminate child-directed from adult-directed speech samples from two dissimilar language/cultural communities; an urban Farsi-speaking population, and a rural, horticulturalist Tseltal Mayan speaking community. We also examined the relationship between participants' addressee classification and ratings of positive affect. Naive raters could successfully classify CDS in Farsi, but only trained raters were successful with the Tseltal Mayan sample. Associations with some affective ratings were found for the Farsi samples, but not reliably for happy speech. These findings point to a complex relationship between perception of affect and CDS, and context-specific effects on the ability to classify CDS across languages.
| S-EPMC8440885 | biostudies-literature
Project description:When acquiring language, young children may use acoustic spectro-temporal patterns in speech to derive phonological units in spoken language (e.g., prosodic stress patterns, syllables, phonemes). Children appear to learn acoustic-phonological mappings rapidly, without direct instruction, yet the underlying developmental mechanisms remain unclear. Across different languages, a relationship between amplitude envelope sensitivity and phonological development has been found, suggesting that children may make use of amplitude modulation (AM) patterns within the envelope to develop a phonological system. Here we present the Spectral Amplitude Modulation Phase Hierarchy (S-AMPH) model, a set of algorithms for deriving the dominant AM patterns in child-directed speech (CDS). Using Principal Components Analysis, we show that rhythmic CDS contains an AM hierarchy comprising 3 core modulation timescales. These timescales correspond to key phonological units: prosodic stress (Stress AM, ~2 Hz), syllables (Syllable AM, ~5 Hz) and onset-rime units (Phoneme AM, ~20 Hz). We argue that these AM patterns could in principle be used by naïve listeners to compute acoustic-phonological mappings without lexical knowledge. We then demonstrate that the modulation statistics within this AM hierarchy indeed parse the speech signal into a primitive hierarchically-organised phonological system comprising stress feet (proto-words), syllables and onset-rime units. We apply the S-AMPH model to two other CDS corpora, one spontaneous and one deliberately-timed. The model accurately identified 72-82% (freely-read CDS) and 90-98% (rhythmically-regular CDS) stress patterns, syllables and onset-rime units. This in-principle demonstration that primitive phonology can be extracted from speech AMs is termed Acoustic-Emergent Phonology (AEP) theory. AEP theory provides a set of methods for examining how early phonological development is shaped by the temporal modulation structure of speech across languages. The S-AMPH model reveals a crucial developmental role for stress feet (AMs ~2 Hz). Stress feet underpin different linguistic rhythm typologies, and speech rhythm underpins language acquisition by infants in all languages.
| S-EPMC4671555 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Socioeconomic status predicts the quantity and nature of child-directed speech that parents produce. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unclear. This study investigated whether the cognitive load imposed by resource scarcity suppresses parent talk by examining time-dependent variation in child-directed speech in a socioeconomically diverse sample. We predicted that child-directed speech would be lowest at the end of the month when Americans report the greatest financial strain. 166 parents and their 2.5 to 3-year-old children (80 female) participated in a picture-book activity; the number of utterances, word tokens, and word types used by parents were calculated. All three parent language measures were negatively correlated with the date of the month the activity took place, and this relationship did not vary with parental education. These findings suggest that above and beyond individual properties of parents, contextual factors such as financial concerns exert influence on how parents interact with their children.
| S-EPMC9163051 | biostudies-literature