Week 4 Flashcards
Why do infants prefer ID-speech?
-high contrast between ups and downs (prosody) - domain-general source for their preference
Name 5 properties of ID-speech.
1) higher mean FO (high pitch overall, higher range of pitches)
2) greater FO variability (more frequent ups and downs)
3) shorter utterances
4) longer pauses
5) mothers have a wider FO range
Functions of ID-speech:
Discuss the study about conveying emotion.
(Trainor et al., 2000; Santesso et al., 2007; Singh et al., 2002)
- babies like to have an emotional connection with whom they are talking to
- recorded actors acting out scenarios
- one sentence they were targeting: “hey honey, come over here”
- actors acted out 4 scenarios: love, comfort, surprise and fear
- combined love and comfort due to similarity
- they recorded them saying this sentence in both ID-speech and AD-speech
- measured acoustics: pitch and pitch range
Functions of ID-speech:
How did the infants respond to the study about conveying emotion?
(Trainor et al., 2000; Santesso et al., 2007; Singh et al., 2002)
- pitch range overall: bigger range for surprise, not much difference between ID-speech and AD-speech
- syllable duration: ID-speech is slower because it has longer pauses, but not much measurable difference between duration of syllables between ID and AD
- rhythmic contour
Functions of ID-speech:
How did the infants respond to the study about conveying emotion with ID-speech?
(Santesso et al., 2007)
- EEG and measured heart rates
- heart period: how long it takes for a beat
- base: baby sitting on parents lap and the baby is silent
- when the baby is listening to ID speech while sitting on their parents lap, their EEG and heart rate are slower than when the baby is listening to AD speech
- comforting voice slows baby’s heart rate down
Functions of ID-speech:
How do infants respond to emotional speech?
(Singh et al., 2002)
- a speaker recorded happy, sad and neutral passages in ID-speech and AD-speech
- head turn preference
- how long did they look in this direction vs. that direction
- stronger preference = longer look
- no difference between neutral and sad
- listened longer to the happy than the neutral ID-speech
- also listened longer to the happy than the neutral AD-speech
- like happy voices–> something about the emotional content
Functions of ID-speech:
Discuss the study about phonetic properties of ID-speech.
(Kuhl et al., 1997)
- 10 women each : Russian, English, Swedish
- AD-speech and ID-speech
- target vowels: /a/, /i/, /u/
- relatively neutralistic recordings
- recorded them speaking to another native speaker of that language and also recorded them speaking to their babies
- no constraint on conversation, just toys to play with that contained the vowels they wanted to target
- why these vowels: represent front, middle, and back vowels in every language
Functions of ID-speech:
Discuss the findings of the study about phonetic properties of ID-speech.
(Kuhl et al., 1997)
- women elicited all these words with the 3 vowels
- vowel space expanded
- more extreme vowels to babies
- ID-vowel space is expanded relative to the AD-vowel space
- smaller on average though
Describe the experiment about perceiving phonemic contrasts with english & hindi.
- english and hindi adults
- english-acquiring infants
- english children 4, 8, 12 years old
- ask them to discriminate an english contrast and a hindi contrast
- sound changes, if infant turns their head then they noticed it
- adults pushed a button when they heard the sound change
- english acquiring adults did very poorly with the hindi contrast
- english speaking babies (6-8 months) were just as good as the hindi speaking adults at discriminating the contrasting sounds in hindi
- 4, 8, 12 year olds were just as bad as the english speaking adults with the hindi contrast
What is perceptual reorganization?
-not absolute loss, your mind just chooses not to hear the contrast (may still be able too though)
Describe the experiment about perceptual Reorganization for Tones in english & mandarin/cantonese homes.
- infants 0;6 and 0;9
- conditioned head-turn paradigm
- lexical tones and non-speech tones
- recruited them from monolingual english homes or homes where at least one parent was a speaker of mandarin/cantonese
- kids were trained to turn their head if their was a stimulus change
- some of the stimuli were chinese syllables with a difference in tone and some were non-speech tones synthesized using synthetic violin sounds
- the spoken chinese syllables and violin sounds: acoustic difference was the same, same pitch change
Perceptual Reorganization for Tones in english & mandarin/cantonese homes: results in Chinese infants, lexical tone in Chinese
-just as good at 6 & 9 months
Perceptual Reorganization for Tones in english & mandarin/cantonese homes: chinese infants, non-speech tones
-better at 9 months than 6 months
Perceptual Reorganization for Tones in english & mandarin/cantonese homes: english infants, lexical tone in Chinese
getting a lot worse from 6 to 9 months
Perceptual Reorganization for Tones in english & mandarin/cantonese homes: english infants, non-speech tone
a little better at 9 months than 6 months
