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Browsing by Author "Ostroff, Wendy Louise"

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    Non-linguistic Influences on Infants' Nonnative Phoneme Perception: Exaggerated prosody and Visual Speech Information Aid Discrimination
    Ostroff, Wendy Louise (Virginia Tech, 2000-05-09)
    Research indicates that infants lose the capacity to perceive distinctions in nonnative sounds as they become sensitive to the speech sounds of their native language (i.e., by 10- to 12-months of age). However, investigations into the decline in nonnative phonetic perception have neglected to examine the role of non-linguistic information. Exaggerated prosodic intonation and facial input are prominent in the infants' language-learning environment, and both have been shown to ease the task of speech perception. The current investigation was designed to examine the impact of infant-directed (ID) speech and facial input on infants' ability to discriminate phonemes that do not contrast in their native language. Specifically, 11-month-old infants were tested for discrimination of both a native phoneme contrast and a nonnative phoneme contrast across four conditions, including an auditory manipulation (ID speech vs. AD speech) and a visual manipulation (Face vs. Geometric Form). The results indicated that infants could discriminate the native phonemes across any of the four conditions. Furthermore, the infants could discriminate the nonnative phonemes if they had enhanced auditory and visual information available to them (i.e., if they were presented in ID speech with a synchronous facial display), and if the nonnative discrimination task was the infants' first test session. These results suggest that infants do not lose the capacity to discriminate nonnative phonemes by the end of the first postnatal year, but that they rely on certain language-relevant and non-linguistic sources of information to discriminate nonnative sounds.
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    The Perceptual Draw of Prosody: Infant-Directed Speech within the Context of Declining Nonnative Speech Perception
    Ostroff, Wendy Louise (Virginia Tech, 1998-10-07)
    Infant speech perception develops within the context of specific language experience. While there is a corpus of empirical evidence concerning infants' perception of linguistic and prosodic information in speech, few studies have explored the interaction of the two. The present investigation was designed to combine what is known about infants' perception of nonnative phonemes (linguistic information) with what is known about infant preferences for ID speech (prosodic information). In particular, the purpose of this series of studies was to examine infant preferences for ID speech within the timeline of the phonemic perceptual reorganization that occurs at the end of the first postnatal year. In Experiment 1, 20 Native-English 10- to 11-month-old infants were tested in an infant-controlled preference procedure for attention to ID speech in their native language versus ID speech in a foreign language. The results showed that infants significantly preferred the ID-native speech. In Experiment 2, the preferred prosodic information (ID speech) was separated from the preferred linguistic information (native speech), as a means of discerning the relative perceptual draw of these types of speech characteristics. Specifically, a second group of 20 10- to 11-month-old infants was tested for a preference between ID speech in a foreign language and AD speech in their native language. In this case the infants exhibited a significant preference for ID-foreign speech, suggesting that prosodic information in speech has more perceptual weight than linguistic information. This pattern of results suggests that infants attend to linguistic-level information by 10- to 11-months of age, and that ID speech may play a role in the native-language tuning process by directing infants' attention to linguistic specifics in speech.