Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

0 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

Three-year-olds' production of Australian English phonemic vowel length as a function of prosodic context.

ABSTRACT: Durational contrasts are used not only to signal phrasal boundaries and focused constituents, but also to make phonemic distinctions. Boundary and focus effects can therefore interact with phonemic length contrasts, presenting a challenge for learners. Boundary effects are most clearly seen in the syllable rhyme, where the nucleus and coda are longer in utterance-final compared to utterance-medial position, the magnitude of lengthening diminishing leftward from the end of the word. In the case of focus, where the nucleus and coda are also lengthened, the magnitude of lengthening diminishes rightwards toward the end of the word. The goal of this paper was therefore to compare productions of the phonemic vowel length contrast /ɐː/ vs /ɐ/ in adults and 3-yr-old children learning Australian English in the face of competing demands from boundary and focus lengthening. The results showed that the children maintain the /ɐː/ vs /ɐ/ contrast across prosodic contexts. They are also able to implement an adult-like pattern of boundary-related lengthening, but are still developing focus-related lengthening. The findings suggest that these 3-yr-olds have good command of the phonemic vowel length contrast, but are still fine-tuning language-specific aspects of temporal organization (i.e., the vowel-coda trading relationship) within the rhyme.

SUBMITTER: Yuen I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4042502 | biostudies-other | 2014 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Similar Datasets

Cross-generational vowel change in American English.

Project description:This study examines cross-generational changes in the vowel systems in central Ohio, southeastern Wisconsin and western North Carolina. Speech samples from 239 speakers, males and females, were divided into three age groups: grandparents (66-91 years old), parents (35-51) and children (8-12). Acoustic analysis of vowel dynamics (i.e., formant movement) was undertaken to explore variation in the amount of spectral change for each vowel. A robust set of cross-generational changes in /ɪ, ε, æ, ɑ/ was found within each dialect-specific vowel system, involving both their positions and dynamics. With each successive generation, /ɪ, ε, æ/ become increasingly monophthongized and /ɑ/ is diphthongized in children. These changes correspond to a general anticlockwise parallel rotation of vowels (with some exceptions in /ɪ/ and /ε/). Given the widespread occurrence of these parallel chain-like changes, we term this development the "North American Shift" which conforms to the general principles of chain shifting formulated by Labov (1994) and others.

| S-EPMC4134908 | biostudies-literature

Coarticulatory vowel nasalization in American English: Data of individual differences in acoustic realization of vowel nasalization as a function of prosodic prominence and boundary.

Project description:This article provides acoustic measurements data for vowel nasalization which are based on speech recorded from fifteen (8 female and 7 male) native speakers of American English in a laboratory setting. Each individual speaker's production patterns for the vowel nasalization in tautosyllabic CVN and NVC words are documented in terms of three acoustic parameters: the duration of nasal consonant (N-Duration), the duration of vowel (V-Duration) and the difference between the amplitude of the first formant (A1) and the first nasal peak (P0) obtained from the vowel (A1-P0) as an indication of the degree of vowel nasalization. The A1-P0 is measured at three different time points within the vowel -i.e., the near point (25%), midpoint (50%), and distant point (75%), either from the onset (CVN) or the offset (NVC) of the nasal consonant. These measures are taken from the target words in various prosodic prominence and boundary contexts: phonologically focused (PhonFOC) vs. lexically focused (LexFOC) vs. unfocused (NoFOC) conditions; phrase-edge (i.e., phrase-final for CVN and phrase-initial for NVC) vs. phrase-medial conditions. The data also contain a CSV file with each speaker's mean values of the N-Duration, V-Duration, and A1-P0 (z-scored) for each prosodic context along with the information about the speakers' gender. For further discussion of the data, please refer to the full-length article entitled "Prosodically-conditioned fine-tuning of coarticulatory vowel nasalization in English"(Cho et al., 2017).

| S-EPMC6806609 | biostudies-literature

Three-year-olds' understanding of the consequences of joint commitments.

Project description:Here we investigate the extent of children's understanding of the joint commitments inherent in joint activities. Three-year-old children either made a joint commitment to assemble a puzzle with a puppet partner, or else the child and puppet each assembled their own puzzle. Afterwards, children who had made the joint commitment were more likely to stop and wait for their partner on their way to fetch something, more likely to spontaneously help their partner when needed, and more likely to take over their partner's role when necessary. There was no clear difference in children's tendency to tattle on their partner's cheating behavior or their tendency to distribute rewards equally at the end. It thus appears that by 3 years of age making a joint commitment to act together with others is beginning to engender in children a "we"-intentionality which holds across at least most of the process of the joint activity until the shared goal is achieved, and which withstands at least some of the perturbations to the joint activity children experience.

| S-EPMC3762880 | biostudies-literature

Visual attention in 5-year-olds from three different cultures.

Project description:Cognitive processes differ markedly between children from different cultures, with best evidence for attention to visual scenes and the activities of others. Children from urban Western cultures tend to focus on focal objects, whereas children from urban East-Asian cultures rather attend to contextual elements of a visual scene. Regarding the attention to others' activities, children from subsistence-based farming communities often observe several activities simultaneously, while children from urban Western contexts focus on activities sequentially. Here we assessed 144 5-year-old children from three prototypical cultural contexts (urban Germany, rural Cameroon, urban Japan) to investigate variations in attention across a variety of tasks. Attention to the elements of a visual scene was assessed in an optical illusion task, in picture descriptions and an eye-tracking paradigm. Attention to and learning from others' activities was assessed in a parallel action task and a rule-based game. Some tasks indicated higher context-sensitive attention in urban Japan, while other findings indicated higher context-sensitive attention in urban Germany. Levels of parallel attention and learning from others' activities were lower in rural Cameroonian children compared to the urban samples. Across tasks, the visual attention measures were unrelated. These findings substantiate that culture has a profound influence on early cognitive development, already in the preschool years. Furthermore, they raise critical questions about the early origins of cultural specificities in attention and the generalizability of attention phenomena beyond specific tasks and populations.

| S-EPMC6047771 | biostudies-literature

Durational cues to fricative codas in 2-year-olds' American English: voicing and morphemic factors.

Project description:In the process of phonological development, fricatives are generally assumed to be later acquired than stops. However, most of the observational work on which this claim is based has concerned itself with word-initial onset consonants; little is known about how and when fricatives are mastered in word-final coda position (e.g., nose). This is all the more critical in a language like English, where word-final fricatives often carry important morphological information (e.g., toes, goes). This study examines the development of duration cues to the voicing feature contrast in coda fricatives, using longitudinal spontaneous speech data from CVC words (e.g., noise vs face) produced by three children (1;6-2;6 years) and six mothers. Results show that the children were remarkably adult-like in the use of duration cues to voicing contrasts in fricatives even in this early age range. Furthermore the children, like the mothers, had longer frication noise durations for morphemic compared to non-morphemic fricatives (e.g., toes vs nose) when these segments occurred in utterance-final position. These results suggest that although children's fricatives tend to be overall longer and more voiced compared to those of adults, the voicing and morphological contrasts for fricative codas are acquired early in production.

| S-EPMC3663930 | biostudies-other

Recognition of facial emotions of varying intensities by three-year-olds.

Project description:Early facial emotion recognition is hypothesized to be critical to later social functioning. However, relatively little is known about the typical intensity thresholds for recognizing facial emotions in preschoolers, between 2 and 4 years of age. This study employed a behavioral sorting task to examine the recognition of happy, fearful, and angry expressions of varying intensity in a large sample of 3-year-old children (N = 208). Thresholds were similar for all expressions; accuracy, however, was significantly lower for fear. Fear and anger expressions above threshold were significantly more confused with one another than with other expressions. In contrast, neutral faces were significantly more often interpreted as happy than as angry or fearful. These results provide a comparison point for future studies of early facial emotion recognition in typical and atypical populations of children in this age group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

| S-EPMC6263821 | biostudies-literature

Three-Year-Olds' Understanding of Desire Reports Is Robust to Conflict.

Project description:In this paper, we present two experiments with 3-year-olds, exploring their interpretation of sentences about desires. A mature concept of desire entails that desires may conflict with reality and that different people may have conflicting desires. While previous literature is suggestive, it remains unclear whether young children understand that (a) agents can have counterfactual desires about current states of affairs and (b) agents can have desires that conflict with one's own desires or the desires of others. In this article, we test preschoolers' interpretation of want sentences, in order to better understand their ability to represent conflicting desires, and to interpret sentences reporting these desires. In the first experiment, we use a truth-value judgment task (TVJT) to assess 3-year-olds' understanding of want sentences when the subject of the sentence has a desire that conflicts with reality. In the second experiment, we use a game task to induce desires in the child that conflict with the desires of a competitor, and assess their understanding of sentences describing these desires. In both experiments, we find that 3-year-olds successfully interpret want sentences, suggesting that their ability to represent conflicting desires is adult-like at this age. Given that 3-year-olds generally display difficulty attributing beliefs to others that conflict with reality or with the child's own beliefs, these findings may further cast some doubt on the view that children's persistent difficulty with belief (think) is caused by these kinds of conflicts.

| S-EPMC5826074 | biostudies-literature

Sparseness of vowel category structure: Evidence from English dialect comparison.

Project description:Current models of speech perception tend to emphasize either fine-grained acoustic properties or coarse-grained abstract characteristics of speech sounds. We argue for a particular kind of 'sparse' vowel representations and provide new evidence that these representations account for the successful access of the corresponding categories. In an auditory semantic priming experiment, American English listeners made lexical decisions on targets (e.g. load) preceded by semantically related primes (e.g. pack). Changes of the prime vowel that crossed a vowel-category boundary (e.g. peck) were not treated as a tolerable variation, as assessed by a lack of priming, although the phonetic categories of the two different vowels considerably overlap in American English. Compared to the outcome of the same experiment with New Zealand English listeners, where such prime variations were tolerated, our experiment supports the view that phonological representations are important in guiding the mapping process from the acoustic signal to an abstract mental representation. Our findings are discussed with regard to current models of speech perception and recent findings from brain imaging research.

| S-EPMC3956075 | biostudies-literature

Learning phonology from surface distributions, considering Dutch and English vowel duration.

Project description:In learning language, children must discover how to interpret the linguistic significance of phonetic variation. On some accounts, receptive phonology is grounded in perceptual learning of phonetic categories from phonetic distributions drawn over the infant's sample of speech. On other accounts, receptive phonology is instead based on phonetic generalizations over the words in the lexicon. Tests of these hypotheses have been rare and indirect, usually making use of idealized estimates of phonetic variation. Here we evaluated these hypotheses, using as our test case English and Dutch toddlers' different interpretation of the lexical significance of vowel duration. Analysis of thousands of vowels of one Dutch and three English mothers' speech suggests that children's language-specific differences in interpretation of vowel duration are likely due to detection of lexically specific patterns, rather than bimodality in raw phonetic distributions.

| S-EPMC6788768 | biostudies-literature

Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift.

Project description:A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Tokens that were relatively high and front tended to be followed by tokens that were also high and front; the repetition effect weakened with greater time between the prime and target; and the repetition effect was stronger if the prime and target belonged to (different tokens of) the same word. Contrary to our expectations, however, the cross-vowel effects suggest that the repetition effect responded not to the direction of vowel changes within the SFVS, but rather the peripherality of the tokens. We also found an interaction between priming behavior and gender, with stronger repetition effects among men than women. While these findings both indicate that priming manifests in continuous phonetic variation and provide further evidence that priming is among the factors providing structure to intraspeaker variation, they also challenge unitary accounts of priming phenomena.

| S-EPMC9326802 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data