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1.
Ear Hear ; 45(5): 1274-1283, 2024.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-38769615

RESUMO

OBJECTIVES: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in perceiving fundamental frequency (F0) information because CIs do not transmit F0 effectively. In Mandarin, F0 can contrast meanings at the word level, that is, via lexical tones with distinct F0 contours, and signal contrastive relations between words at the utterance-level, that is, via contrastive focus with expanded F0 range and longer duration. Mandarin-speaking children with CIs have been reported to face challenges in producing distinct F0 contours across tones, but early implantation facilitates tonal acquisition. However, it is still unclear if utterance-level prosody, such as contrastive focus, is also challenging for these children, and if early implantation also offers benefits for focus production. Therefore, this study asked how accurately children with CIs can produce contrastive focus, and if early implantation leads to more accurate focus production, with acoustic patterns approaching that of children with typical hearing (TH). DESIGN: Participants included 55 Mandarin-speaking children (3 to 7 years) with CIs and 55 age-matched children with TH. Children produced noun phrases with and without contrastive focus, such as RED-COLORED cat versus red-colored cat . Three adult native listeners perceptually scored the productions as correct or incorrect. The "correct" productions were then acoustically analyzed in terms of F0 range and duration. RESULTS: Based on the perceptual scores, children with CIs produced focus with significantly lower accuracy (38%) than their TH peers (84%). The acoustic analysis on their "correct" productions showed that children with TH used both F0 and duration to mark focus, producing focal syllables with an expanded F0 range and long duration, and postfocal syllables with a reduced F0 range and short duration. However, children with CIs differed from children with TH in that they produced focal syllables with long duration but not an expanded F0 range, although they produced postfocal syllables with a reduced F0 range and short duration like their TH peers. In addition, early implantation correlated with the percept of more accurate focus productions and better use of F0 range in focal marking. CONCLUSIONS: This study finds that Mandarin-speaking children with CIs are still learning to apply appropriate acoustic cues to contrastive focus. The challenge appears to lie in the use of an expanded F0 range to mark focus, probably related to the limited transmission of F0 information through the CI devices. These findings thus have implications for parents and those working with children with CIs, showing that utterance-level prosody also requires speech remediation, and underscores the critical role of identifying problems early in the acquisition of F0 functions in Mandarin, not only at the word level but also at the utterance-level.


Assuntos
Implante Coclear , Implantes Cocleares , Percepção da Fala , Humanos , Pré-Escolar , Masculino , Criança , Feminino , Surdez/reabilitação , Acústica da Fala , Idioma , Estudos de Casos e Controles
2.
J Acoust Soc Am ; 152(6): 3313, 2022 12.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36586851

RESUMO

Children as young as five have some ability to produce contrastive focus [Wells et al. (2004) J. Child Lang. 31, 749-778]. However, adult listeners' ability to identify the location of contrastive focus depends on whether the speech came from a 4-, 7-, or 11-year-old [Patel and Brayton (2009) J. Speech. Lang. Hear. Res. 52, 790-801]. Recent acoustic studies have also reported the use of F0 vs duration in contrastive focus productions by American English-speaking 2-year-olds [Thorson and Morgan (2021) J. Child Lang. 48, 541-568] and 4-year-olds [Wonnacott and Watson (2008) Cognition 107, 1093-1101], respectively. This study, therefore, evaluated the extent to which older 6-year-olds, with more language experience, used F0 and/or duration when producing contrastive focus, and compared this to adult speech. Monosyllabic and disyllabic adjective + noun targets (e.g., green ball) in utterance medial and final position were elicited from 20 Australian English-speaking 6-year-olds and 14 adults in adjective focus and noun focus conditions. Although both adults and children used high F0, only adults consistently used word and stressed syllable duration as well. This suggests that children may master the different acoustic cues to contrastive focus at different stages of development, with late cue integration.


Assuntos
Acústica da Fala , Percepção da Fala , Adulto , Humanos , Criança , Estados Unidos , Pré-Escolar , Austrália , Idioma , Fala , Acústica , Fonética
3.
Int J Audiol ; 61(6): 490-499, 2022 06.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-34237224

RESUMO

OBJECTIVE: Examine the effect of language experience on auditory evoked and oscillatory brain responses to lexical tone in passive (ACC) and active (P300) listening conditions. DESIGN: Language experience was evaluated using two groups, Mandarin- vs. English-listeners (with vs. without lexical tone experience). Two Mandarin lexical tones with pitch movement (T2 rising; T3 dipping) produced on the syllable /ba/ were used as stimuli. For passive listening, each tone was presented in a block. For active listening, each tone was the standard (80%) or deviant (20%) presented in two blocks. Presentation order was counterbalanced across participants in both tasks. STUDY SAMPLE: 10 adult Mandarin-listeners and 13 Australian-English-listeners contributed to the data. RESULTS: Both global field power (GFP) and time frequency analysis (TFA) failed to detect group differences in passive listening conditions for the ACC response. In contrast, the active listening condition revealed significant group differences for T2. GFP showed a trending significance with larger GFP (less consistent responses) in English- than Mandarin-listeners. TFA showed significantly higher alpha synchronisation (more focussed attention) for Mandarin- compared to English-listeners. CONCLUSIONS: Acoustic responses to speech is influenced by language experience but only during active listening, suggesting that focussed attention is linked to higher level language processes.


Assuntos
Idioma , Percepção da Fala , Acústica , Adulto , Austrália , Humanos , Percepção da Altura Sonora/fisiologia , Percepção da Fala/fisiologia
4.
J Child Lang ; : 1-29, 2022 Mar 24.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-35321769

RESUMO

It is often assumed that pre-schoolers learn a second language (L2) with ease, even for structures that are absent in their L1, such as Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers learning L2 English grammatical inflections (e.g., ducks, horses). However, while the results from Study 1 showed that such learners can imitate plural words (age = 3;5, N = 20), Studies 2 and 3 showed that they cannot yet generate or comprehend plural morphology (Study 2: age = 4;8, N = 20; Study 3: age = 4;1, N = 20), raising questions about when this is achieved. These findings have important implications for school readiness, as well as for identifying those at risk of developmental language disorders.

5.
J Child Lang ; 49(3): 602-614, 2022 05.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-33877044

RESUMO

Learning to use word versus phrase level prosody to identify compounds from lists is thought to be a protracted process, only acquired by 11 years (Vogel & Raimy, 2002). However, a recent study has shown that 5-year-olds can use prosodic cues other than stress for these two structures in production, at least for early-acquired noun-noun compounds (Yuen et al., 2021). This raises the question of whether children this age can also use naturally-produced prosody to identify noun-noun compounds from their list forms in comprehension. The results show that 5-6-year-olds (N = 28) can only identify compounds. Unlike adults, children as a group could not use boundary cues to identify lists and were significantly slower in their processing compared to adults. This suggests that the acquisition of word level prosody may precede the acquisition of phrase level prosody, i.e., some higher-level aspects of phrasal prosody may take longer to acquire.


Assuntos
Percepção da Fala , Adulto , Criança , Pré-Escolar , Compreensão , Sinais (Psicologia) , Humanos , Idioma , Desenvolvimento da Linguagem
6.
Ear Hear ; 42(5): 1405-1411, 2021.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-33974784

RESUMO

OBJECTIVES: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in acquiring tones, since CIs do not transmit pitch information effectively. It has been suggested that longer CI experience provides additional benefits for children implanted early, enabling them to achieve language abilities similar to that of normal-hearing (NH) children (Colletti 2009). Mandarin is a tonal language with four lexical tones and a neutral tone (T0), characterized by distinct pitch and durational patterns. It has been suggested that early implantation (i.e., before 2 years) greatly benefits the acquisition of Mandarin tones by children with CIs (Tang et al. 2019c). In this study, we extend those findings to investigate the effect of CI experience on the acquisition of Mandarin tones for children implanted early. We asked the extent to which they were able to produce distinct pitch and durational patterns of both lexical tones and T0 as a function of CI experience, and the extent to which their tonal productions were acoustically like that of NH children. DESIGN: Forty-four NH 3-year olds and 28 children implanted with CIs between 1 and 2 years, aged 3 to 7, were recruited. The children with CIs were grouped according to the length of CI experience: 3 to 6 years, 2 to 3 years, and 1 to 2 years. Lexical tone and T0 productions were elicited using a picture-naming task. Tonal productions from the children with CIs were acoustically analyzed and compared with those from the NH children. RESULTS: Children with 3 to 6 years of CI experience were able to produce distinct pitch and durational patterns for both lexical tones and T0, with NH-like acoustic realizations. Children with 2 to 3 years of CI experience were also able to produce the expected tonal patterns, although their productions were not yet NH-like. Those with only 1 to 2 years of CI experience, however, were not yet able to produce the distinct acoustic patterns for either lexical tones or T0. CONCLUSIONS: These results provide acoustic evidence demonstrating that, when Mandarin-speaking children are implanted before the age of 2, only those with 3 to 6 years of experience were able to produce NH-like tones, including both lexical tone and T0. Children with shorter CI experience (less than 3 years) were unable to produce distinct acoustic patterns for the different tones. This suggests that at least 3 years of CI experience is still needed for early implanted children to acquire tonal distinctions similar to those of NH 3-year olds.


Assuntos
Implante Coclear , Implantes Cocleares , Percepção da Fala , Criança , Pré-Escolar , Humanos , Idioma , Percepção da Altura Sonora
7.
J Child Lang ; 48(1): 110-128, 2021 01.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-32398184

RESUMO

Although previous research has indicated that five-year-olds can use acoustic cues to disambiguate compounds (N1 + N2) from lists (N1, N2) (e.g., 'ice-cream' vs. 'ice, cream') (Yoshida & Katz, 2004, 2006), their productions are not yet fully adult-like (Wells, Peppé & Goulandris, 2004). The goal of this study was to examine this issue in Australian English-speaking children, with a focus on their use of F0, word duration, and pauses. Twenty-four five-year-olds and 20 adults participated in an elicited production experiment. Like adults, children produced distinct F0 patterns for the two structures. They also used longer word durations and more pauses in lists compared to compounds, indicating the presence of a boundary in lists. However, unlike adults, they also inappropriately inserted more pauses within the compound, suggesting the presence of a boundary in compounds as well. The implications for understanding children's developing knowledge of how to map acoustic cues to prosodic structures are discussed.


Assuntos
Linguagem Infantil , Sinais (Psicologia) , Acústica da Fala , Percepção da Fala , Adulto , Fatores Etários , Austrália , Criança , Pré-Escolar , Feminino , Humanos , Desenvolvimento da Linguagem , Masculino , Adulto Jovem
8.
Child Dev ; 91(6): e1211-e1230, 2020 11.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-32745250

RESUMO

This longitudinal study investigated the effects of maternal emotional health concerns, on infants' home language environment, vocalization quantity, and expressive language skills. Mothers and their infants (at 6 and 12 months; 21 mothers with depression and or anxiety and 21 controls) provided day-long home-language recordings. Compared with controls, risk group recordings contained fewer mother-infant conversational turns and infant vocalizations, but daily number of adult word counts showed no group difference. Furthermore, conversational turns and infant vocalizations were stronger predictors of infants' 18-month vocabulary size than depression and anxiety measures. However, anxiety levels moderated the effect of conversational turns on vocabulary size. These results suggest that variability in mothers' emotional health influences infants' language environment and later language ability.


Assuntos
Ansiedade , Linguagem Infantil , Filho de Pais com Deficiência , Depressão Pós-Parto , Relações Mãe-Filho , Adulto , Desenvolvimento Infantil/fisiologia , Filho de Pais com Deficiência/educação , Filho de Pais com Deficiência/psicologia , Comunicação , Depressão , Feminino , Humanos , Lactente , Recém-Nascido , Desenvolvimento da Linguagem , Estudos Longitudinais , Masculino , Relações Mãe-Filho/psicologia , Mães/psicologia , Transtornos Puerperais , Vocabulário , Adulto Jovem
9.
J Child Lang ; 47(3): 695-708, 2020 05.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-31739822

RESUMO

Subject-verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns (The sheep is/are fat), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas (Where is/are the [novel noun(s)]?). Novel nouns were either morphologically unambiguous (tup/tups) or ambiguous (/geks/ = singular: gex / plural: gecks). Preschoolers (and some adults) ignored the singular copula, interpreting /ks/-final words as plural, raising questions about the role of SV agreement in learners' sentence comprehension and the status of is in Australian English.


Assuntos
Compreensão , Desenvolvimento da Linguagem , Psicolinguística , Semântica , Adulto , Austrália , Pré-Escolar , Comportamento de Escolha , Feminino , Humanos , Idioma , Masculino
10.
J Exp Child Psychol ; 185: 95-108, 2019 09.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-31129475

RESUMO

Previous intermodal preferential looking (IPL) studies have found that children learning English acquire knowledge of plural allomorphs incrementally. The segmental plural /-s/ (e.g., cats) is understood at 24 months of age, whereas the syllabic plural /-əz/ (e.g., buses) is not comprehended until 36 months. Production studies also show ongoing challenges with the syllabic plural /-əz/, suggesting a prolonged weaker representation for this allomorph. IPL studies also suggest that children do not understand the singular, which has no overt marking, until 36 months of age. However, the status of children's developing representations of the singular has been largely unstudied. The current study, therefore explored 116 3- and 4-year-olds' developing comprehension of novel singular and plural words, where the plurals were inflected with segmental and syllabic plural allomorphs. Results found that children were equally proficient at identifying novel plurals of both allomorph types, increasing accuracy with age. However, children's accuracy with novel singulars did not increase with age, raising questions about the representation of null morphology. Children's equal accuracy across plural allomorphs is more consistent with rule-based models of morphological representation than those proposing morphology as an emergent property of the lexicon. However, neither model completely accounts for the developmental differences found between singular and plural.


Assuntos
Compreensão/fisiologia , Desenvolvimento da Linguagem , Fatores Etários , Pré-Escolar , Feminino , Humanos , Aprendizagem/fisiologia , Masculino , Fonética , Semântica , Vocabulário
11.
J Child Lang ; 46(1): 24-50, 2019 01.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-30068398

RESUMO

Weak syllables in Germanic and Romance languages have been reported to be challenging for young children, with syllable omission and/or incomplete reduction persisting till age five. In Mandarin Chinese, neutral tone (T0) involves a weak syllable with varied pitch realizations across (preceding) tonal contexts and short duration. The present study examined how and when T0 was acquired by 108 Beijing Mandarin-speaking children (3-5 years) relative to 33 adult controls. Lexicalized (familiar) and non-lexicalized (unfamiliar) T0 words were elicited in different preceding tonal contexts. Unlike previous reports, the present study revealed that children as young as three years have already developed a phonological category for T0, exhibiting contextually conditioned tonal realizations of T0 for both familiar and unfamiliar items. However, mastery of adult-like pitch and duration implementation of T0 is a protracted process not completed until age five. The implications for the acquisition of weak syllables more generally are discussed.


Assuntos
Desenvolvimento da Linguagem , Acústica da Fala , Acústica , Adulto , Criança , Pré-Escolar , Feminino , Humanos , Idioma , Linguística , Masculino , Adulto Jovem
12.
J Acoust Soc Am ; 142(5): 2823, 2017 11.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-29195426

RESUMO

Mandarin lexical tones are modified in both infant-directed speech (IDS) and Lombard speech, resulting in tone hyperarticulation. However, it is unclear if these registers also alter contextual tones (neutral tone and tone sandhi) and if such phonetic modification might affect acquisition of these tones. This study therefore examined how neutral tone and tone sandhi are realized in IDS, and how their acoustic manifestations compare with those in Lombard speech, where the communicative needs of listeners differ. Neutral tone and tone sandhi productions were elicited from 15 Mandarin-speaking mothers during (1) interactions with their 12-month-old infants (IDS), (2) in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a noisy environment (Lombard speech), and (3) in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a quiet environment (adult-directed speech). The results showed that, although both contextual tones were modified in IDS and Lombard speech, their key tone features were maintained. In addition, IDS and Lombard speech modified these tones differently: IDS increased pitch height and modified pitch contour, while Lombard speech increased pitch height only. The realization of neutral tone and tone sandhi across registers is discussed with reference to listeners' different communicative needs.


Assuntos
Acústica , Comportamento Materno , Relações Mãe-Filho , Ruído/efeitos adversos , Fonética , Acústica da Fala , Medida da Produção da Fala/métodos , Comportamento Verbal , Qualidade da Voz , Adolescente , Adulto , Sinais (Psicologia) , Humanos , Lactente , Mascaramento Perceptivo , Discriminação da Altura Tonal , Processamento de Sinais Assistido por Computador , Espectrografia do Som , Percepção da Fala , Adulto Jovem
13.
J Acoust Soc Am ; 142(2): 493, 2017 08.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-28863611

RESUMO

Speech units are reported to be hyperarticulated in both infant-directed speech (IDS) and Lombard speech. Since these two registers have typically been studied separately, it is unclear if the same speech units are hyperarticulated in the same manner between these registers. The aim of the present study is to compare the effect of register on vowel and tone modification in the tonal language Mandarin Chinese. Vowel and tone productions were produced by 15 Mandarin-speaking mothers during interactions with their 12-month-old infants during a play session (IDS), in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a 70 dBA eight-talker babble noise environment (Lombard speech), and in a quiet environment (adult-directed speech). Vowel space expansion was observed in IDS and Lombard speech, however, the patterns of vowel-shift were different between the two registers. IDS displayed tone space expansion only in the utterance-final position, whereas there was no tone space expansion in Lombard speech. The overall pitch increased for all tones in both registers. The tone-bearing vowel duration also increased in both registers, but only in utterance-final position. The difference in speech modifications between these two registers is discussed in light of speakers' different communicative needs.


Assuntos
Mães , Fonética , Acústica da Fala , Qualidade da Voz , Acústica , Adolescente , Adulto , Feminino , Humanos , Lactente , Masculino , Ruído , Espectrografia do Som , Medida da Produção da Fala , Adulto Jovem
14.
Front Psychol ; 15: 1302044, 2024.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-38449749

RESUMO

Australian Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers must acquire linguistic structures that occur only in the community language (e.g., English inflectional grammar). This study investigated how they acquire such structures and any relationship between linguistic knowledge and language experience on their performance. Twenty 4-6-year-olds showed known monolingual acquisition patterns with good performance for producing the progressive, developing ability for plurals, but only emerging ability for past and present tense. Better performance was related to a larger English vocabulary, more mixed language input and use, but less Mandarin input and use. On average, these children received less than 50% input in English and were performing behind monolinguals.

15.
Dev Psychol ; 59(5): 845-861, 2023 May.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36480361

RESUMO

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a contrastive context facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used inappropriately in a noncontrastive context misleads listeners to predict an incorrect referent, hindering the identification process (Ito et al., 2012, 2014). In Mandarin Chinese, the mapping between prosodic form and contrastive focus is less transparent, potentially delaying the acquisition of contrastive focus. This study assessed the online processing of contrastive focus by 196 Mandarin-speaking 4-10-year-olds and 34 adults in China, using the visual world paradigm. Stimuli contained a target NP in a mini discourse, with focus being used in contrastive (Experiment 1) versus Noncontrastive contexts (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that the appropriate use of prosodic form for contrastive focus facilitated the identification of a target referent for 7-10-year-olds and adults, though not younger children. Experiment 2 showed that the inappropriate use of prosodic form for contrastive focus slowed the identification process only for 10-year-olds and adults. Thus, whereas 7-10-year-olds are sensitive to prosodic form for contrastive focus, only 10-year-olds use it as a primary cue to predict an upcoming referent like adults. The acquisition of contrastive focus in Mandarin is therefore a gradual process, with children showing sensitivity to contrastive focus during the early school years, and developing adult-like form-function mapping between prosody and focus until the end of primary school. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).


Assuntos
Compreensão , Idioma , Percepção da Fala , Adulto , Criança , Humanos , Sinais (Psicologia) , População do Leste Asiático , Instituições Acadêmicas , Pré-Escolar
16.
PLoS One ; 18(1): e0277762, 2023.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36630343

RESUMO

High levels of maternal responsiveness are associated with healthy cognitive and emotional development in infants. However, depression and anxiety can negatively impact individual mothers' responsiveness levels and infants' expressive language abilities. Australian mother-infant dyads (N = 48) participated in a longitudinal study examining the effect of maternal responsiveness (when infants were 9- and 12-months), and maternal depression and anxiety symptoms on infant vocabulary size at 18-months. Global maternal responsiveness ratings were stronger predictors of infants' vocabulary size than levels of depression and anxiety symptoms. However, depression levels moderated the effect of maternal responsiveness on vocabulary size. These results highlight the importance of screening for maternal responsiveness-in addition to depression-to identify infants who may be at developmental risk. Also, mothers with elevated depression need support to first reduce their symptoms so that improvements in their responsiveness have the potential to be protective for their infant's language acquisition.


Assuntos
Depressão , Relações Mãe-Filho , Feminino , Humanos , Lactente , Depressão/psicologia , Estudos Longitudinais , Relações Mãe-Filho/psicologia , Austrália , Mães/psicologia , Cognição , Idioma
17.
Front Psychol ; 13: 797602, 2022.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36312115

RESUMO

This study examined the spoken narrative skills of a group of bilingual Mandarin-English speaking 3-6-year-olds (N = 25) in Australia, using a remote online story-retell task. Bilingual preschoolers are an understudied population, especially those who are speaking typologically distinct languages such as Mandarin and English which have fewer structural overlaps compared to language pairs that are typologically closer, reducing cross-linguistic positive transfer. We examined these preschoolers' spoken narrative skills as measured by macrostructures (the global organization of a story) and microstructures (linguistic structures, e.g., total number of utterances, nouns, verbs, phrases, and modifiers) across and within each language, and how various factors such as age and language experiences contribute to individual variability. The results indicate that our bilingual preschoolers acquired spoken narrative skills similarly across their two languages, i.e., showing similar patterns of productivity for macrostructure and microstructure elements in both of their two languages. While chronological age was positively correlated with macrostructures in both languages (showing developmental effects), there were no significant correlations between measures of language experiences and the measures of spoken narrative skills (no effects for language input/output). The findings suggest that although these preschoolers acquire two typologically diverse languages in different learning environments, Mandarin at home with highly educated parents, and English at preschool, they displayed similar levels of oral narrative skills as far as these macro-/micro-structure measures are concerned. This study provides further evidence for the feasibility of remote online assessment of preschoolers' narrative skills.

18.
J Speech Lang Hear Res ; 63(2): 552-568, 2020 02 26.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-32004109

RESUMO

Purpose Normal-hearing (NH) children acquire plural morphemes at different rates, with the segmental allomorphs /-s, -z/ (e.g., cat-s) being acquired before the syllabic allomorph /-əz/ (e.g., bus-es). Children with hearing loss (HL) have been reported to show delays in the production of plural morphology, raising the possibility that this might be due to challenges acquiring different types of lexical/morphological representations. This study therefore examined the comprehension of plural morphology by 3- to 7-year-olds with HL and compared this with performance by their NH peers. We also investigated comprehension as a function of wearing hearing aids (HAs) versus cochlear implants (CIs). Method Participants included 129 NH children aged 3-5 years and 25 children with HL aged 3-7 years (13 with HAs, 12 with CIs). All participated in a novel word two-alternative forced-choice task presented on an iPad. The task tested comprehension of the segmental (e.g., teps, mubz) and syllabic (e.g., kosses) plural, as well as their singular counterparts (e.g., tep, mub, koss). Results While the children with NH were above chance for all conditions, those with HL performed at chance. As a group, the performance of the children with HL did not improve with age. However, results suggest possible differences between children with HAs and those with CIs, where those with HAs appeared to be in the process of developing representations of consonant-vowel-consonant singulars. Conclusions Results suggest that preschoolers with HL do not yet have a robust representation of plural morphology for words they have not heard before. However, those with HAs are beginning to access the singular/plural system as they get older.


Assuntos
Linguagem Infantil , Perda Auditiva/psicologia , Transtornos do Desenvolvimento da Linguagem/psicologia , Fonética , Percepção da Fala/fisiologia , Estudos de Casos e Controles , Criança , Pré-Escolar , Implantes Cocleares , Compreensão , Feminino , Auxiliares de Audição , Perda Auditiva/complicações , Humanos , Transtornos do Desenvolvimento da Linguagem/etiologia , Masculino , Análise e Desempenho de Tarefas
19.
Brain Sci ; 10(12)2020 Dec 12.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-33322798

RESUMO

Maternal depression and anxiety have been proposed to increase the risk of adverse outcomes of language development in the early years of life. This study investigated the effects of maternal depression and anxiety on language development using two approaches: (i) a categorical approach that compared lexical abilities in two groups of children, a risk group (mothers with clinical-level symptomatology) and a control non-risk group, and (ii) a continuous approach that assessed the relation between individual mothers' clinical and subclinical symptomatology and their infants' lexical abilities. Infants' lexical abilities were assessed at 18 months of age using an objective lexical processing measure and a parental report of expressive vocabulary. Infants in the risk group exhibited lower lexical processing abilities compared to controls, and maternal depression scores were negatively correlated to infants' lexical processing and vocabulary measures. Furthermore, maternal depression (not anxiety) explained the variance in infants' individual lexical processing performance above the variance explained by their individual expressive vocabulary size. These results suggest that significant differences are emerging in 18-month-old infants' lexical processing abilities, and this appears to be related, in part, to their mothers' depression and anxiety symptomatology during the postnatal period.

20.
Dev Psychol ; 55(10): 2114-2122, 2019 Oct.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-31343227

RESUMO

Phonological processes result in surface variants of the same words across phonological contexts, posing potential word learning challenges for children. Mandarin tone sandhi is a tonal process changing Tone 3 (T3) in different tonal and syntactic contexts, resulting in allophonic variants of T3 in connected speech. Previous studies found that Mandarin-learning 3-year-olds were able to productively apply tone sandhi processes in novel compounds, correctly using the allophonic variants of T3 in appropriate tone sandhi contexts (Tang et al., 2018, 2019). However, it remains unclear how these variants are represented in children's mental lexicon. This study, therefore, examined Mandarin-learning children's perceptual representation of allophonic variants of T3. Ninety-four 3- to 5-year-olds and 29 adults were tested. Sensitivity to allophonic mispronunciations of T3 syllables in novel tone sandhi compounds was measured using a visual fixation procedure. The results showed that children, like adults, treated tone sandhi mispronunciations as target-like. Thus, in recognizing novel tone sandhi words, Mandarin-speaking children exhibit flexibility in accommodating the allophonic variants of T3, suggesting that they have developed an abstract T3 category in their mental lexicon. The findings reveal the effect of phonological processes in shaping children's phonological representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).


Assuntos
Fonética , Psicolinguística , Percepção da Fala , Adulto , Pré-Escolar , China , Feminino , Humanos , Idioma , Masculino , Adulto Jovem
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