Ranka Bijeljac-Babic

The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography.

The links between spellings and sounds in a large set of English words with consonant-vowel-consonant phonological structure were examined. orthographic rimes, or units consisting of a vowel grapheme and a final consonant grapheme, had more stable pronunciations than either individual vowels or initial consonant-plus-vowel units. In 2 large-scale studies of word pronunciation, the consistency of pronunciation of the orthographic rime accounted for variance in latencies and errors beyond that contributed by the consistency of pronunciation of the individual graphemes and by other factors. In 3 experiments, as well, children and adults made more errors on words with less consistently pronounced orthographic rimes than on words with more consistently pronounced orthographic rimes. Relations between spellings and sounds in the simple monomorphemic words of English are more predictable when the level of onsets and rimes is taken into account than when only graphemes and phonemes are considered.

Masked orthographic priming in bilingual word recognition

Two lexical decision experiments tested the influence of briefly presented orthographically related primes on target word recognition in bilinguals. The prime stimuli were high-frequency words either from the same language as that of the target or from the other language known by the bilingual subjects. When the prime and target were from the same language, orthographically related primes systematically inhibited target word recognition, whereas orthographically dissimilar primes did not. When the prime and target were words from different languages, the amount of inhibition increased as a function of subjects’ level of proficiency in the prime word’s language, with highly proficient bilinguals showing practically equivalent amounts of within and across language inhibitory priming. These results strongly suggest that a printed string of letters can simultaneously activate lexical representations in both of the bilingual’s languages (insofar as these share the same alphabet), even when subjects are performing a monolingual task.

An investigation of young infants' perceptual representations of speech sounds.

The present study examined the ability of newborns and 2-month-olds to detect phonetic differences between syllables. By relying on the modified high-amplitude sucking procedure, which did not permit the infants to use a simple same-different response, the present experiments tapped the perceptual representations of the speech sounds. Infants as young as a few days old displayed some capacity to represent differences in a set of syllables varying in their phonetic composition, although there was no convincing evidence that their representations were structured in terms of phonetic segments. Finally, evidence of developmental changes in speech processing were noted for the first time with infants in this age range. The change noted was a tendency from global toward more specific representations on the part of the older infants.

Language specific prosodic preferences during the first half year of life: Evidence from German and French infants

There is converging evidence that infants are sensitive to prosodic cues from birth onwards and use this kind of information in their earliest steps into the acquisition of words and syntactic regularities of their target language. Regarding word segmentation, it has been found that English-learning infants segment trochaic words by 7.5 months of age, and iambic words only by 10.5 months of age [Jusczyk, P. W., Houston, D. M., & Newsome, M. (1999). The beginnings of word segmentation in English-learning infants. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 159-207]. The question remains how to interpret this finding in relation to results showing that English-learning infants develop a preference for trochaic over iambic words between 6 and 9 months of age [Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Redanz, N. (1993). Preference for the predominant stress patterns of English words. Child Development, 64, 675-687]. In the following, we report the results of four experiments using the headturn preference procedure (HPP) to explore the trochaic bias issue in German- and French-learning infants. For German, a trochaic preference was found at 6 but not at 4 months, suggesting an emergence of this preference between both ages (Experiments 1 and 2). For French, 6-month-old infants did not show a preference for either stress pattern (Experiment 3) while they were found to discriminate between the two stress patterns (Experiment 4). Our findings are the first to demonstrate that the trochaic bias is acquired by 6 months of age, is language specific and can be predicted by the rhythmic properties of the language in acquisition. We discuss the implications of this very early acquisition for our understanding of the emergence of segmentation abilities.

Dichotic perception and laterality in neonates

Groups of 4-day-old neonates were tested for dichotic discrimination and ear differences with the High-Amplitude-Sucking procedure. In the first experiment, dichotic speech discrimination was attested by comparison with a control group. Furthermore, among those subjects who showed a substantial recovery of sucking response at least after one of the two syllable changes, it was observed that significantly more subjects manifested a stronger reaction to a right-ear change than to a left-ear change. In the second experiment, 4-day-old neonates were tested on syllable and music timbre discrimination. The significant Stimulus Type x Ear interaction observed suggests perceptual asymmetries indicative of very precocious brain specialization.

Discrimination in neonates of very short CVs

The experiment reported here explores the ability of 4- to 5-day-old neonates to discriminate consonantal place of articulation and vowel quality using shortened CV syllables similar to those used by Blumstein and Stevens [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67, 648-662 (1980)], without vowel steady-state information. The results show that the initial 34-44 ms of CV stimuli provide infants with sufficient information to discriminate place of articulation differences in stop consonants ([ba] vs [da], [ba] vs [ga], [bi] vs [di], and [bi] vs [gi]) and following vowel quality ([ba] vs [bi], [da] vs [di], and [ga] vs [gi]). These results suggest that infants can discriminate syllables on the basis of the onset properties of CV signals. Furthermore, this experiment indicates that neonates require little or no exposure to speech to succeed in such a discrimination task.

The role of attention in speech perception by young infants

Abstract The present study explored how attentional focus affects the perception of speech in 4-day-old and 2-month-old infants. Attentional focus was manipulated by changing the composition of a set of syllables to which infants were habituated. In the first experiment, we familiarized infants with sets of stimuli that included members judged to be near neighbors in perceptual space (Shepard,1972). Under these conditions, both 4-day-olds and 2-month-olds were able to detect the addition of a new syllable to the set. In the second experiment, one of the familiarization sets was chosen to include members that were perceptually very dissimilar. In this situation, the 2-month-olds, but not the 4-day-olds, were able to detect the addition of a new syllable that was similar to one of the familiarization set members. These results have some interesting implications for the way in which basic speech perception capacities are attuned to sound structure of the native language.

Infants can rapidly learn words in a foreign language

The present study used an object manipulation task to explore whether infants are able to learn words in a foreign language. French-learning 20-month-olds, who were taught new words in either English or French by a bilingual French-English speaker, succeeded in both language conditions.

On the importance of being bilingual: Word stress processing in a context of segmental variability

French-learning infants have language-specific difficulties in processing lexical stress due to the lack of lexical stress in French. These difficulties in discriminating between words with stress-initial (trochaic) and stress-final (iambic) patterns emerge by 10months of age in the easier context of low variability (using a single item pronounced with a trochaic pattern vs. an iambic pattern) as well as in the more challenging context of high segmental variability (using lists of segmentally different trochaic and iambic items). These findings raise the question of stress pattern perception in simultaneous bilinguals learning French and a second language using stress at the lexical level. Bijeljac-Babic, Serres, Höhle, and Nazzi (2012) established that at 10 months of age, in the simpler context of low variability, such bilinguals have better stress discrimination abilities than French-learning monolinguals. The current study explored whether this advantage extends to the more challenging context of high segmental variability. Results first establish stress pattern discrimination in a group of bilingual 10-month-olds learning French and one language with (variable) lexical stress, but not in French-learning 10-month-old monolinguals. Second, discrimination in bilinguals appeared not to be affected by the language balance of the infants, suggesting that sensitivity to stress patterns might be maintained in these bilingual infants provided that they hear at least 30% of a language with lexical stress.

Early Prosodic Acquisition in Bilingual Infants: The Case of the Perceptual Trochaic Bias.

Infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language before 12 months, as shown by the emergence of a trochaic bias in English-learning infants between 6 and 9 months (Jusczyk et al., 1993), and in German-learning infants between 4 and 6 months (Höhle et al., 2009, 2014), while French-learning infants do not show a bias at 6 months (Höhle et al., 2009). This language-specific emergence of a trochaic bias is supported by the fact that English and German are languages with trochaic predominance in their lexicons, while French is a language with phrase-final lengthening but lacking lexical stress. We explored the emergence of a trochaic bias in bilingual French/German infants, to study whether the developmental trajectory would be similar to monolingual infants and whether amount of relative exposure to the two languages has an impact on the emergence of the bias. Accordingly, we replicated Höhle et al. (2009) with 24 bilingual 6-month-olds learning French and German simultaneously. All infants had been exposed to both languages for 30 to 70% of the time from birth. Using the Head Preference Procedure, infants were presented with two lists of stimuli, one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /GAba/ with word-initial stress (trochaic pattern), the second one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /gaBA/ with word-final stress (iambic pattern). The stimuli were recorded by a native German female speaker. Results revealed that these French/German bilingual 6-month-olds have a trochaic bias (as evidenced by a preference to listen to the trochaic pattern). Hence, their listening preference is comparable to that of monolingual German-learning 6-month-olds, but differs from that of monolingual French-learning 6-month-olds who did not show any preference (Höhle et al., 2009). Moreover, the size of the trochaic bias in the bilingual infants was not correlated with their amount of exposure to German. The present results thus establish that the development of a trochaic bias in simultaneous bilinguals is not delayed compared to monolingual German-learning infants (Höhle et al., 2009) and is rather independent of the amount of exposure to German relative to French.