Call me Alix, not Elix: vowels are more important than consonants in own-name recognition at 5 months.

Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of consonants and vowels at the onset of lexical acquisition was assessed in French-learning 5-month-olds by testing sensitivity to minimal phonetic changes in their own name. Infants' reactions to mispronunciations revealed sensitivity to vowel but not consonant changes. Vowels were also more salient (on duration and intensity) but less distinct (on spectrally based measures) than consonants. Lastly, vowel (but not consonant) mispronunciation detection was modulated by acoustic factors, in particular spectrally based distance. These results establish that consonant changes do not affect lexical recognition at 5 months, while vowel changes do; the consonant bias observed later in development does not emerge until after 5 months through additional language exposure.

Complex linguistic rules modulate early auditory brain responses.

During speech perception, listeners compensate for phonological rules of their language. For instance, English place assimilation causes green boat to be typically pronounced as greem boat; English listeners, however, perceptually compensate for this rule and retrieve the intended sound (n). Previous research using EEG has focused on rules with clear phonetic underpinnings, showing that perceptual compensation occurs at an early stage of speech perception. We tested whether this early mechanism also accounts for the compensation for more complex rules. We examined compensation for French voicing assimilation, a rule with abstract phonological restrictions on the contexts in which it applies. Our results reveal that perceptual compensation for this rule by French listeners modulates an early ERP component. This is evidence that early stages of speech sound categorization are sensitive to complex phonological rules of the native language.