Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez

Phonotactic acquisition in healthy preterm infants

Previous work has shown that preterm infants are at higher risk for cognitive/language delays than full-term infants. Recent studies, focusing on prosody (i.e. rhythm, intonation), have suggested that prosodic perception development in preterms is indexed by maturational rather than postnatal/listening age. However, because prosody is heard in-utero, and preterms thus lose significant amounts of prenatal prosodic experience, both their maturation level and their prosodic experience (listening age) are shorter than that of full-terms for the same postnatal age. This confound does not apply to the acquisition of phonetics/phonotactics (i.e. identity and order of consonants/vowels), given that consonant differences in particular are only perceived after birth, which could lead to a different developmental pattern. Accordingly, we explore the possibility that consonant-based phonotactic perception develops according to listening age. Healthy French-learning full-term and preterm infants were tested on the perception of consonant sequences in a behavioral paradigm. The pattern of development for full-term infants revealed that 7-month-olds look equally at labial-coronal (i.e. /pat/) compared to coronal-labial sequences (i.e. /tap/), but that 10-month-olds prefer the labial-coronal sequences that are more frequent in the French lexicon. Preterm 10-month-olds (having 10 months of phonetic listening experience but 7 months of maturational age) behaved as full-term 10-month-olds. These results establish that preterm developmental timing for consonant-based phonotactic acquisition is based on listening age (experience with input). This questions the interpretation of previous results on prosodic acquisition in terms of maturational constraints, and raises the possibility that different constraints apply to the acquisition of different phonological subcomponents.

Delayed acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic distributional regularities.

The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior-anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two non-adjacent vowels. Experiments 1 and 2 show that a preference for PA over AP (anterior-posterior) words emerges between 10 and 13 months in French-learning infants. Control experiments show that this bias cannot be explained by adjacent or positional preferences. The present study demonstrates that infants become sensitive to non-adjacent vocalic distributional regularities between 10 and 13 months, showing the existence of a delay for the acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic regularities compared to equivalent non-adjacent consonantal regularities. These results are consistent with the CV hypothesis, according to which consonants and vowels play different roles at different linguistic levels.

Acquisition du langage chez l’enfant prématuré durant la première année de vie☆

Previous studies have shown that preterm children are at a higher risk for cognitive and language delays than full-term children. Most of these studies have concentrated on the effects of prematurity during the preschool or school years, while the effect of preterm birth on the early development of language, much of which occurs during the first year of life, remains very little explored. This article focuses on this crucial period and reviews the studies that have explored early phonological and lexical development in preterm infants. The results of these studies show uneven proficiency in different language subdomains in preterm infants. This raises the possibility that different constraints apply to the acquisition of different linguistic subcomponents in this population, in part as a result of a complex interaction between maturation, experience, and language subdomains.

Infants’ sensitivity to nonadjacent vowel dependencies: The case of vowel harmony in Hungarian

Vowel harmony is a linguistic phenomenon whereby vowels within a word share one or several of their phonological features, constituting a nonadjacent, and thus challenging, dependency to learn. It can be found in a large number of agglutinating languages, such as Hungarian and Turkish, and it may apply both at the lexical level (i.e., within word stems) and at the morphological level (i.e., between stems and their affixes). Thus, it might affect both lexical and morphological development in infants whose native language has vowel harmony. The current study asked at what age infants learning an irregular harmonic language, Hungarian, become sensitive to vowel harmony within word stems. In a head-turn preference study, 13-month-old, but not 10-month-old, Hungarian-learning infants preferred listening to nonharmonic VCV (vowel-consonant-vowel) pseudowords over vowel-harmonic ones. A control experiment with 13-month-olds exposed to French, a nonharmonic language, showed no listening preference for either of the sequences, suggesting that this finding cannot be explained by a universal preference for nonharmonic sequences but rather reflects language-specific knowledge emerging between 10 and 13 months of age. We discuss the implications of this finding for morphological and lexical learning.