Karen Mattock

Preverbal Infants’ Sensitivity to Synaesthetic Cross-Modality Correspondences

Stimulation of one sensory modality can induce perceptual experiences in another modality that reflect synaesthetic correspondences among different dimensions of sensory experience. In visual-hearing synaesthesia, for example, higher pitched sounds induce visual images that are brighter, smaller, higher in space, and sharper than those induced by lower pitched sounds. Claims that neonatal perception is synaesthetic imply that such correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception. To date, the youngest children in whom such correspondences have been confirmed with any certainty were 2- to 3-year-olds. We examined preferential looking to assess 3- to 4-month-old preverbal infants’ sensitivity to the correspondences linking auditory pitch to visuospatial height and visual sharpness. The infants looked longer at a changing visual display when this was accompanied by a sound whose changing pitch was congruent, rather than incongruent, with these correspondences. This is the strongest indication to date that synaesthetic cross-modality correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception.

The role of sound symbolism in language learning

Certain correspondences between the sound and meaning of words can be observed in subsets of the vocabulary. These sound-symbolic relationships have been suggested to result in easier language acquisition, but previous studies have explicitly tested effects of sound symbolism on learning category distinctions but not on word learning. In 2 word learning experiments, we varied the extent to which phonological properties related to a rounded-angular shape distinction and we distinguished learning of categories from learning of individual words. We found that sound symbolism resulted in an advantage for learning categories of sound-shape mappings but did not assist in learning individual word meanings. These results are consistent with the limited presence of sound symbolism in natural language. The results also provide a reinterpretation of the role of sound symbolism in language learning and language origins and a greater specification of the conditions under which sound symbolism proves advantageous for learning.

Developmental and cross-linguistic variation in the infant vowel space: The case of Canadian English and Canadian French

This article describes the results of two experiments. Experiment 1 was a cross-sectional study designed to explore developmental and cross-linguistic variation in the vowel space of 10- to 18-month-old infants, exposed to either Canadian English or Canadian French. Acoustic parameters of the infant vowel space were described (specifically the mean and standard deviation of the first and second formant frequencies) and then used to derive the grave, acute, compact, and diffuse features of the vowel space across age. A decline in mean F1 with age for French-learning infants and a decline in mean F2 with age for English-learning infants was observed. A developmental expansion of the vowel space into the high-front and high-back regions was also evident. In experiment 2, the Variable Linear Articulatory Model was used to model the infant vowel space taking into consideration vocal tract size and morphology. Two simulations were performed, one with full range of movement for all articulatory paramenters, and the other for movement of jaw and lip parameters only. These simulated vowel spaces were used to aid in the interpretation of the developmental changes and cross-linguistic influences on vowel production in experiment 1.

Emergence of the corner vowels in the babble produced by infants exposed to Canadian English or Canadian French.

This paper examined the emergence of corner vowels ([i], [u], [ae] and [a]) in the infant vowel spaces and the influence of the ambient language on babbling, in particular, on the frequency of occurrence of the corner vowels. Speech samples were recorded from 51 Canadian infants from 8 to 18 months of age, respectively, English-learning infants (n=24) and French-learning infants (n=27). The acoustic parameters (F1 and F2) of each codable infant vowel were analyzed and then used to plot all the vowels along the diffuse–compact (F2−F1) and grave–acute dimensions ([F1+F2]/2). Listener judgments of vowel category were obtained for the most extreme vowels in each infants vowel space, i.e., the 10% vowels with minimum or maximum diffuse–compact and grave–acute values. The judgments of adult listeners, both anglophone (n=5) and francophone (n=5), confirmed the peripheral expansion of infant vowel space toward the diffuse and grave corners with age. Furthermore, English-learning infants were judged by both English and French-speaking listeners to produce a greater frequency of [u] in the grave corner, in comparison with French-learning infants. The higher proportion of [u] in English sample was observed throughout the age range suggesting the influence of ambient language at a young age.

Maturation of Executive Functioning Skills in Early Sequential Bilingualism.

Previous research has demonstrated that being bilingual from birth is advantageous for the development of skills of social cognition, executive functioning, and metalinguistic awareness due to bilingual childrens extensive experience of processing and manipulating two linguistic systems. The present study investigated whether these cognitive advantages are also evident in sequential bilinguals, i.e., children who began the acquisition of their second language later in childhood. Monolingual English- and English-speaking children acquiring Welsh as a second language matched in age (M age = 4.6), and English receptive vocabulary completed three tasks of attentional control, metalinguistic awareness, and metarepresentation. Sequential bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in the task of attentional control, while no differences were found in the metalinguistic awareness and metarepresentation tasks. These findings suggest that attentional control is the first cognitive component advantaged by early sequential bilingualism and further highlight the benefits of second language exposure in the context of early formal education.

Integrating constraints for learning word-referent mappings

Learning word-referent mappings is complex because the word and its referent tend to co-occur with multiple other words and potential referents. Such complexity has led to proposals for a host of constraints on learning, though how these constraints may interact has not yet been investigated in detail. In this paper, we investigated interactions between word co-occurrence constraints and cross-situational statistics in word learning. Analyses of child-directed speech revealed that when both object-referring and non-referring words occurred in the utterance, referring words were more likely to be preceded by a determiner than when the utterance contained only referring words. In a word learning study containing both referring and non-referring words, learning was facilitated when non-referring words contributed grammatical constraints analogous to determiners. The complexity of multi-word utterances provides an opportunity for co-occurrence constraints to contribute to word-referent mapping, and the learning mechanism is able to integrate these multiple sources of information.

The effects of linguistic experience on the flexible use of mutual exclusivity in word learning

Mutual Exclusivity (ME) is a prominent constraint in language acquisition, which guides children to establish one-to-one mappings between words and referents. But how does unfolding experience of multiple-to-one word-meaning mappings in bilingual childrens environment affect their understanding of when to use ME and when to accept lexical overlap? Three-to-five-year-old monolingual and simultaneous bilingual children completed two pragmatically distinct tasks, where successful word learning relied on either the default use of ME or the ability to accept overlapping labels. All children could flexibly use ME by following the social-pragmatic directions available in each task. However, linguistic experience shaped the development of ME use, whereby older monolinguals showed a greater reliance on the one-to-one mapping assumption, but older bilinguals showed a greater ability to accept lexical overlap. We suggest that flexible use of ME is thus shaped by pragmatic information present in each communicative interaction and childrens individual linguistic experience.

Disambiguation of Novel Labels and Referential Facts: A Developmental Perspective.

Disambiguation refers to children’s tendency to assign novel labels to unfamiliar rather than familiar referents. It is employed as a word-learning strategy, but it remains unknown whether it is a domain-specific phenomenon or a manifestation of more general pragmatic competence. To assess the domain-specificity and development of disambiguation, this study tested children from two age groups (ages 3;7–4;6 and 4;7–5;7) and adults on a disambiguation of novel labels and referential facts paradigm. A linear contrast analysis showed that the difference between disambiguation from labels and disambiguation from facts increased significantly as the participants’ age increased. The results indicate that at the early stages of word learning, children reason by exclusion to disambiguate the meaning of a variety of referential actions, but with increasing understanding about the communicative process, this inferential reasoning develops into a strategy limited to lexical acquisition.

Preverbal Infants Are Sensitive to Cross-Sensory Correspondences: Much Ado About the Null Results of Lewkowicz and Minar (2014)

Minar and Lewkowicz (2013) previously reported their failure to replicate the results of two experiments we published in this journal (Walker et al., 2010), despite using the same stimuli. Their commentary (Lewkowicz & Minar, 2014) now explains that the sound they used differed significantly from ours, and we show here how the nature of their sound critically undermined their attempted replication. They also propose an alternative explanation of our results (though one that remains unsubstantiated). We show how their alternative explanation actually predicts that they also should have observed the results we reported, assumes infants are sensitive to the pitch-height correspondence they are attempting to deny, and is contradicted by the evidence. Lewkowicz and Minar propose that when the pitch and loudness of a sound both rise and fall together, the sound has an internal congruence that attracts attention. Because our sound diminished in loudness as it approached the upper and lower limits of its pitch range (peaking in loudness midpitch), such congruence was present only when the sound was in its lower pitch range (e.g., during the first 1.25 s of the 2.5 s it took to go from lowest to highest pitch). Lewkowicz and Minar speculate that such congruence during the very first moments of an (up to 60 s) animation will induce infants to look longer toward the screen across the remainder of the trial. Because they assume that all our animations began with the ball in its lowest location, or with the morphing shape in its most rounded form, Lewkowicz and Minar reason that the initial internal congruence of our sound was confounded with the audiovisual congruence of the animations. Trials starting with the ball at the upper location, or the morphing shape in its most pointy form, would be expected to reveal a reverse audiovisual-congruity effect because the initial internal congruence of the sound would then be confounded with audiovisual incongruence. We can confirm that though our ball animations always began with the ball in its lowest location, the morphing shape in Experiment 2 always began in its most pointy form. In the latter case, therefore, the initial internal congruence of the sound was confounded with audiovisual incongruity and so should have encouraged longer looking times on audiovisually incongruent trials than on audiovisually congruent trials. The near identical audiovisual-congruity effect observed in both cases thus contradicts Lewkowicz and Minar’s proposal. It is noteworthy that Lewkowicz and Minar’s sounds also were internally incongruent above the midpoint of their pitch range, with pitch changing while loudness remained constant. With their moving-ball animations always beginning with the ball in its lowest location, their own account should have predicted the audiovisualcongruity effect we reported, rather than null results. Lewkowicz and Minar’s proposal that infants are sensitive to the internal pitch-loudness congruity of sounds requires infants to be sensitive to the correspondence between pitch and height. Pitch-loudness congruity cannot arise from the common coding of pitch and loudness on the basis of their magnitude or strength because pitch is not a prothetic dimension (e.g., people do not refer to sounds as having more or less pitch and, in any case, they judge loud to be big and high pitch to be small). Further, although pitch and loudness share terms in 520170 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797613520170Walker et al.Cross-Sensory Correspondences in Infancy research-article2014

Language preference in monolingual and bilingual infants

Previous research shows that infants being raised in single‐language families have some basic language discrimination abilities at birth, that these skills improve over the first 6 months of life, and that infants are attending to the rhythmic properties of language to perform these skills. Research has also revealed that newborns and older babies from monolingual families prefer listening to their native language over an unfamiliar language. Data on language discrimination and preference in bilingual infants is very limited but is necessary to determine if the patterns and rate of bilingual language development parallel those of monolingual development, or if exposure to more than one language modifies developmental patterns. The present study addresses this issue by comparing language preference in monolingual English, monolingual French, and bilingual English–French infants between 3 and 10 months of age. Infant preference to listen to passages in three rhythmically different languages (English, French...