Tonal interference in word learning? A comparison of Cantonese and French.

Most languages of the world use lexical tones to contrast words. Thus, understanding how individuals process tones when learning new words is fundamental for a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying word learning. The current study asked how tonal information is integrated during word learning. We investigated whether variability in tonal information during learning can interfere with the learning of new words and whether this is language and age dependent. Cantonese- and French-learning 30-month-olds (N = 97) and Cantonese- and French-speaking adults (N = 50) were tested with an eye-tracking task on their ability to learn phonetically different pairs of novel words in two learning conditions: a 1-tone condition in which each object was named with a single label and a 3-tone condition in which each object was named with three different labels varying in tone. We predicted learning in all groups in the 1-tone condition. For the 3-tone condition, because tones are part of the phonological system of Cantonese but not of French, we expected the Cantonese groups to either fail (toddlers) or show lower performance than in the 1-tone condition (adults), whereas the French groups might show less sensitivity to this manipulation. The results show that all participants learned in the 1-tone condition and were sensitive to tone variation to some extent. Learning in the 3-tone condition was impeded in both groups of toddlers. We argue that tonal interference in word learning likely comes from the phonological level in the Cantonese groups and from the acoustic level in the French groups.

Stimulating the motor development of very premature infants: effects of early crawling training on a mini-skateboard.

Aim: To examine the effects of an early home-based 8-week crawling intervention performed by trained therapists on the motor and general development of very premature infants during the first year of life. Methods: At term-equivalent age, immediately following discharge from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), we randomly allocated 44 premature infants born before 32 weeks' gestation without major brain damage to one of three conditions in our intervention study: crawling on a mini-skateboard, the Crawliskate (Crawli), prone positioning control (Mattress), or standard care (Control). The Crawli and Mattress groups received 5 min daily at-home training administered by trained therapists for 8 consecutive weeks upon discharge from the NICU. The outcomes of greatest interest included gross motor development (Bayley-III) at 2, 6, 9, and 12 months (primary outcome) corrected age (CA), mature crawling at 9 months CA and general development at 9 and 12 months CA [Ages and Stages Questionnaires-3 (ASQ-3)]. The study was registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov; registration number: NCT05278286. Results: A 3 (Condition) × 4 (Age) repeated measures ANOVA revealed that Crawli group infants had significantly higher Bayley-III gross motor development scores than Mattress and Control group infants. Crawli group infants also scored significantly higher on groups of Bayley-III items related to specific motor skills than infants in the other groups, including crawling at 9 months CA. We found significant differences in favor of the Crawli group in separate one-way ANOVAs at each of the ages we examined. A 3 (Condition) × 2 (Age) repeated measures ANOVA revealed that the Crawli group scored significantly higher than the Control group for the ASQ-3 total score and communication score and significantly higher for the fine motor score than the Control and Mattress groups. We found additional significant differences in favor of the Crawli group for other dimensions of the ASQ-3 in separate one-way ANOVAs at 9 and 12 months CA. Interpretation: Early crawling training on a Crawliskate provides an effective way to promote motor and general development in very premature infants. The findings also provide clear evidence for a link between newborn crawling and more mature crawling later in development.

Newborns modulate their crawling in response to their native language but not another language.

Human newborns can propel themselves to their mother's breast when positioned skin to skin on her abdomen just after birth. For decades, researchers have considered this primitive crawling behavior a spinal reflex, immune to supra spinal control. However, recent research suggests that neonatal crawling is already responsive to visual and olfactory stimuli processed at a supra spinal level. Here we report that a few hours post birth, French newborns can also modulate their crawling in response to their native language - a source of information that is processed supra-spinally. The crawling patterns of 23 French-born newborns were recorded on video and via an infrared motion capture system during two randomly ordered 2-min trials. The newborns were secured on a mini skateboard to facilitate arm and leg movements during their crawling propulsion. They heard a repetitive sequence of the same sentences either in French, their native language, or in English, a rhythmically different and hence discriminable unfamiliar language, on each trial. In French, compared to English, crawling was enhanced, with significantly more arm and leg steps and significantly more and larger trunk rotations in the cephalo-caudal axis. Moreover, newborns rotated their heads and trunk toward the appropriate loud speaker when hearing French but not English. These preliminary findings suggest that newborn crawling is not a simple stereotyped reflex under spinal control, but a complex pattern that can be modulated in response to higher-order, supra-spinally processed stimuli. The findings open fascinating questions about the range of stimuli to which newborn crawling is responsive.

Electrophysiological Evidence for A Number-Action Mapping in Infancy.

In the last decades, a growing body of literature has focused on the link between number and action. Many studies conducted on adult participants have provided evidence for a bidirectional influence between numerosity processing and grasping or reaching actions. However, it is not yet clear whether this link is functional in early infancy. Here, we used the event-related potential (ERP) technique to record electrical activity of the brain in response to number-hand pairings. We implemented a cueing paradigm where 3- to 4-month-old infants observed images showing either congruency (e.g., a large numerosity primed by a large hand opening) or incongruency (e.g., a large numerosity primed by a small hand opening). Infants' brain activity was modulated by the congruency of the pairings: amplitudes recorded over frontal and parietal-occipital scalp positions differed for congruent versus incongruent pairings. These findings suggest that the association between number and hand action processing is already functional early in life.

Is Handedness at Five Associated with Prenatal Factors?

The goal of the study was to investigate some of the factors suspected to be related to children's handedness: presentation during the last weeks of gestation and at birth (cephalic or breech), side of presentation (right or left), number of weeks of gestation, season of birth, parents' handedness and sex. We analyzed the relationships between these factors and the child's handedness at five years. Children (n = 1897) from the EDEN cohort participated in the study, among which 1129 were tested for handedness at five. The father's handedness, but not the mother's, was significantly related to the child's hand preference. The percentage of left-handed children was significantly larger when the father was non-right-handed compared to right-handed, and tended to be larger among children in non-left-cephalic presentation compared to left-cephalic presentation. Girls, but not boys, were significantly less lateralized when they were born before 37 weeks of pregnancy than after. Finally, children born in winter or spring were slightly but significantly less lateralized than children born in summer or autumn. All six children who were not lateralized at 5 presented one or several of these factors. These results are discussed in light of the mixed model of handedness.

Perception of accent in bilingual French/American-English children by native adult speakers.

In a previous study, Dodane and Bijeljac-Babic (2017) found that French/AmericanEnglish children aged 3;6 to 6;0, bilingual from birth, produced disyllabic words which had acoustic properties for lexical stress (f0, syllable duration and intensity) that differed from those of monolingual peers, showing cross-linguistic influences. In order to check whether these acoustic differences between the productions of bilingual children and those of their monolingual French- or American English-speaking peers were perceptible by native monolingual adults, we investigated the perception of these words by French and American English native speakers. Using an Elo rating task, participants were asked to indicate in each trial which word out of two competitors was produced by a bilingual child. Words were produced by French- or American English-speaking monolingual children and by two groups of bilinguals, one dominant in French and the other in American-English. The results clearly show that both French and American English monolingual adults were successful in distinguishing the bilingual children from their monolingual peers, but only if they were not dominant in the language of the raters. The relationship between the acoustic correlates of word stress produced by children and the perception of some "accent" by native adult speakers seems more intricate than expected and is further discussed.

Newborn crawling and rooting in response to maternal breast odor.

A growing literature shows that perception and action are already tightly coupled in the newborn. The current study aimed to examine the nature of the coupling between olfactory stimuli from the mother and the newborn's crawling and rooting (exploratory movements of the head). To examine the coupling, the crawling and rooting behavior of 28 2-day-old newborns were studied while they were supported prone on a mobility device shaped like a mini skateboard, the Crawliskate®, their head positioned directly on top of a pad infused with either their mother's breast odor (Maternal) or the odor of water (Control). Video and 3D kinematic analyses of the number and types of limb movements and quantification of displacement across the surface revealed that newborns are significantly more efficient crawlers when they smell the maternal odor, moving greater distances although performing fewer locomotor movements. In addition, the newborns made significantly more head rooting movements in the presence of the maternal odor. These findings suggest that the circuitry underlying quadrupedal locomotion and exploratory movements of the head is already adaptable to olfactory information via higher brain processing. Moreover, the coupling between olfaction and the two action systems, locomotion and rooting, is already differentiated. As crawling enables the newborn to move toward the mother's breast immediately after birth and facilitates mother-infant interaction, the results of this study highlight the potential value of using maternal odors to stimulate mobility in infants at risk of motor delay and/or deprived of this odor when born prematurely.

Emotional face recognition in autism and in cerebral visual impairments: In search for specificity.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by difficulties in the social domain, but also by hyper- and hypo-reactivity. Atypical visual behaviours and processing have often been observed. Nevertheless, several similar signs are also identified in other clinical conditions including cerebral visual impairments (CVI). In the present study, we investigated emotional face categorization in groups of children with ASD and CVI by comparing each group to typically developing individuals (TD) in two tasks. Stimuli were either non-filtered or filtered by low- and high-spatial frequencies (LSF and HSF). All participants completed the autism spectrum quotient score (AQ) and a complete neurovisual evaluation. The results show that while both clinical groups presented difficulties in the emotional face recognition tasks and atypical processing of filtered stimuli, they did not differ from one another. Additionally, autistic traits were observed in the CVI group and symmetrically, some visual disturbances were present in the ASD group as measured via the AQ score and a neurovisual evaluation, respectively. The present study suggests the relevance of comparing ASD to CVI by showing that emotional face categorization difficulties should not be solely considered as autism-specific but merit investigation for potential dysfunction of the visual processing neural network. These results are of interest in both clinical and research perspectives, indicating that systematic visual examination is warranted for individuals with ASD.

Discrimination and identification of lexical tones and consonants in Mandarin-speaking children using cochlear implants.

Mandarin-speaking adults using cochlear implants (CI) experience more difficulties in perceiving lexical tones than consonants. This problem may result from the fact that CIs provide relatively sufficient temporal envelope information for consonant perception in quiet environments, but do not convey the fine spectro-temporal information considered to be necessary for accurate pitch perception. Another possibility is that Mandarin speakers with post-lingual hearing loss have developed language-specific use of these acoustic cues, impeding lexical tone processing under CI conditions. To investigate this latter hypothesis, syllable discrimination and word identification abilities for Mandarin consonants (place and manner) and lexical-tone contrasts (tones 1 vs 3 and 1 vs 2) were measured in 15 Mandarin-speaking children using CIs and age-matched children with normal hearing (NH). In the discrimination task, only children using CIs exhibited significantly lower scores for consonant place contrasts compared to other contrasts, including lexical tones. In the word identification task, children using CIs showed lower performance for all contrasts compared to children with NH, but they both showed specific difficulties with tone 1 vs 2 contrasts. This study suggests that Mandarin-speaking children using CIs are able to discriminate and identify lexical tones and, perhaps more surprisingly, have more difficulties when discriminating consonants.

What Does Prone Skateboarding in the Newborn Tell Us About the Ontogeny of Human Locomotion?

The crawling behavior of sixty 2-day-old newborns was studied while they were supported prone on a mini skateboard and on a pediatric mattress without additional support. Analyses of the number and types of limb movements and their characteristics, the coactivation of limb pairs, and the displacement across the surface, revealed that newborns can crawl with locomotor patterns similar to those documented during quadrupedal locomotion in animals and human adults. This was particularly apparent on the skateboard. This discovery suggests that locomotor circuitry underlying quadrupedal locomotion develops during fetal life. Drawing upon other evidence for a quadrupedal organization underlying bipedal gait, we argue that early quadrupedal training may enhance interventions designed to hasten the onset of independent walking.

Effects of Word Position on the Acoustic Realization of Vietnamese Final Consonants.

A variety of studies have shown differences between phonetic features of consonants according to their prosodic and/or syllable (onset vs. coda) positions. However, differences are not always found, and interactions between the various factors involved are complex and not well understood. Our study compares acoustical characteristics of coda consonants in Vietnamese taking into account their position within words. Traditionally described as monosyllabic, Vietnamese is partially polysyllabic at the lexical level. In this language, tautosyllabic consonant sequences are prohibited, and adjacent consonants are only found at syllable boundaries either within polysyllabic words (CVC.CVC) or across monosyllabic words (CVC#CVC). This study is designed to examine whether or not syllable boundary types (interword vs. intraword) have an effect on the acoustic realization of codas. The results show significant acoustic differences in consonant realizations according to syllable boundary type, suggesting different coarticulation patterns between nuclei and codas. In addition, as Vietnamese voiceless stops are generally unreleased in coda position, with no burst to carry consonantal information, our results show that a vowel's second half contains acoustic cues which are available to aid in the discrimination of place of articulation of the vowel's following consonant.

Human susceptibility to social influence and its neural correlates are related to perceived vulnerability to extrinsic morbidity risks.

Humans considerably vary in the degree to which they rely on their peers to make decisions. Why? Theoretical models predict that environmental risks shift the cost-benefit trade-off associated with the exploitation of others' behaviours (public information), yet this idea has received little empirical support. Using computational analyses of behaviour and multivariate decoding of electroencephalographic activity, we test the hypothesis that perceived vulnerability to extrinsic morbidity risks impacts susceptibility to social influence, and investigate whether and how this covariation is reflected in the brain. Data collected from 261 participants tested online revealed that perceived vulnerability to extrinsic morbidity risks is positively associated with susceptibility to follow peers' opinion in the context of a standard face evaluation task. We found similar results on 17 participants tested in the laboratory, and showed that the sensitivity of EEG signals to public information correlates with the participants' degree of vulnerability. We further demonstrated that the combination of perceived vulnerability to extrinsic morbidity with decoding sensitivities better predicted social influence scores than each variable taken in isolation. These findings suggest that susceptibility to social influence is partly calibrated by perceived environmental risks, possibly via a tuning of neural mechanisms involved in the processing of public information.

Which limb is it? Responses to vibrotactile stimulation in early infancy.

This study focuses on how the body schema develops during the first months of life, by investigating infants' motor responses to localized vibrotactile stimulation on their limbs. Vibrotactile stimulation was provided by small buzzers that were attached to the infants' four limbs one at a time. Four age groups were compared cross-sectionally (3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-month-olds). We show that before they actually reach for the buzzer, which, according to previous studies, occurs around 7-8 months of age, infants demonstrate emerging knowledge about their body's configuration by producing specific movement patterns associated with the stimulated body area. At 3 months, infants responded with an increase in general activity when the buzzer was placed on the body, independently of the vibrator's location. Differentiated topographical awareness of the body seemed to appear around 5 months, with specific responses resulting from stimulation of the hands emerging first, followed by the differentiation of movement patterns associated with the stimulation of the feet. Qualitative analyses revealed specific movement types reliably associated with each stimulated location by 6 months of age, possibly preparing infants' ability to actually reach for the vibrating target. We discuss this result in relation to newborns' ability to learn specific movement patterns through intersensory contingency. Statement of contribution what is already known on infants' sensorimotor knowledge about their own bodies 3-month-olds readily learn to produce specific limb movements to obtain a desired effect (movement of a mobile). infants detect temporal and spatial correspondences between events involving their own body and visual events. what the present study adds until 4-5 months of age, infants mostly produce general motor responses to localized touch. this is because in the present study, infants could not rely on immediate contingent feedback. we propose a cephalocaudal developmental trend of topographic differentiation of body areas.

Temporal expectancies driven by self- and externally generated rhythms.

The dynamic attending theory proposes that rhythms entrain periodic fluctuations of attention which modulate the gain of sensory input. However, temporal expectancies can also be driven by the mere passage of time (foreperiod effect). It is currently unknown how these two types of temporal expectancy relate to each other, i.e. whether they work in parallel and have distinguishable neural signatures. The current research addresses this issue. Participants either tapped a 1Hz rhythm (active task) or were passively presented with the same rhythm using tactile stimulators (passive task). Based on this rhythm an auditory target was then presented early, in synchrony, or late. Behavioural results were in line with the dynamic attending theory as RTs were faster for in- compared to out-of-synchrony targets. Electrophysiological results suggested self-generated and externally induced rhythms to entrain neural oscillations in the delta frequency band. Auditory ERPs showed evidence of two distinct temporal expectancy processes. Both tasks demonstrated a pattern which followed a linear foreperiod effect. In the active task, however, we also observed an ERP effect consistent with the dynamic attending theory. This study shows that temporal expectancies generated by a rhythm and expectancy generated by the mere passage of time can work in parallel and sheds light on how these mechanisms are implemented in the brain.

How should we test infant handedness?

As soon as infants grasp objects, they exhibit some degree of hand preference. Although all studies agree that the number of non-lateralized infants remains high during the first months of life, there is no consensus on the percentage of right- and left-handed infants. Reasons might be the different formulae used to calculate an handedness index, the basis on which handedness categories are distinguished, and the number of trials per session. In this study we aimed to provide a valid method of testing handedness, reliable without being lengthy so as to combine it with other evaluations. We tested 46 infants at 9 and 11 months by giving them 34 trials. We compared the results using 2 of the most used formulae, including the bimanual grasps or not, and considering the first 5, 10, 15, 20, 26, 31, or all 34 trials. The results show that different formulae do not give significantly different results as long as bimanual grasps are included. The number of trials is important: 15 trials are necessary for the reliability of the classification into handedness categories. Giving more trials does not provide substantial additional information.

Infants' First Words are not Phonetically Specified: Own Name Recognition in British English-Learning 5-Month-Olds.

By the end of their first year of life, infants' representations of familiar words contain phonetic detail; yet little is known about the nature of these representations at the very beginning of word learning. Bouchon et al. () showed that French-learning 5-month-olds could detect a vowel change in their own name and not a consonant change, but also that infants reacted to the acoustic distance between vowels. Here, we tested British English-learning 5-month-olds in a similar study to examine whether the acoustic/phonological characteristics of the native language shape the nature of the acoustic/phonetic cues that infants pay attention to. In the first experiment, British English-learning infants failed to recognize their own name compared to a mispronunciation of initial consonant (e.g., Molly versus Nolly) or vowel (e.g., April versus Ipril). Yet in the second experiment, they did so when the contrasted name was phonetically dissimilar (e.g., Sophie versus Amber). Differences in phoneme category (stops versus continuants) between the correct consonant versus the incorrect one significantly predicted infants' own name recognition in the first experiment. Altogether, these data suggest that infants might enter into a phonetic mode of processing through different paths depending on the acoustic characteristics of their native language.

Second Language Ability and Emotional Prosody Perception.

The present study examines the effect of language experience on vocal emotion perception in a second language. Native speakers of French with varying levels of self-reported English ability were asked to identify emotions from vocal expressions produced by American actors in a forced-choice task, and to rate their pleasantness, power, alertness and intensity on continuous scales. Stimuli included emotionally expressive English speech (emotional prosody) and non-linguistic vocalizations (affect bursts), and a baseline condition with Swiss-French pseudo-speech. Results revealed effects of English ability on the recognition of emotions in English speech but not in non-linguistic vocalizations. Specifically, higher English ability was associated with less accurate identification of positive emotions, but not with the interpretation of negative emotions. Moreover, higher English ability was associated with lower ratings of pleasantness and power, again only for emotional prosody. This suggests that second language skills may sometimes interfere with emotion recognition from speech prosody, particularly for positive emotions.

The effect of connectives on the selection of arguments: implicit consequentiality bias for the connective "but".

Recent studies about the implicit causality of inter-personal verbs showed a symmetric implicit consequentiality bias for psychological verbs. This symmetry is less clear for action verbs because the verbs assigning the implicit cause to the object argument (e.g. "Peter protected John because he was in danger.") tend to assign the implicit consequence to the same argument (e.g. "Peter protected John so he was not hurt."). We replicated this result by comparing continuations of inter-personal events followed by a causal connective "because" or a consequence connective "so". Moreover, we found similar results when the consequence connective was replaced by a contrastive connective "but". This result was confirmed in a second experiment where we measured the time required to imagine a consistent continuation for a fragment finishing with "but s/he ...". The results were consistent with a contrastive connective introducing a denial of a consequence of the previous event. The results were consistent with a model suggesting that thematic roles and connectives can predict preferred co-reference relations.

Converging toward a common speech code: imitative and perceptuo-motor recalibration processes in speech production.

Auditory and somatosensory systems play a key role in speech motor control. In the act of speaking, segmental speech movements are programmed to reach phonemic sensory goals, which in turn are used to estimate actual sensory feedback in order to further control production. The adult's tendency to automatically imitate a number of acoustic-phonetic characteristics in another speaker's speech however suggests that speech production not only relies on the intended phonemic sensory goals and actual sensory feedback but also on the processing of external speech inputs. These online adaptive changes in speech production, or phonetic convergence effects, are thought to facilitate conversational exchange by contributing to setting a common perceptuo-motor ground between the speaker and the listener. In line with previous studies on phonetic convergence, we here demonstrate, in a non-interactive situation of communication, online unintentional and voluntary imitative changes in relevant acoustic features of acoustic vowel targets (fundamental and first formant frequencies) during speech production and imitation. In addition, perceptuo-motor recalibration processes, or after-effects, occurred not only after vowel production and imitation but also after auditory categorization of the acoustic vowel targets. Altogether, these findings demonstrate adaptive plasticity of phonemic sensory-motor goals and suggest that, apart from sensory-motor knowledge, speech production continuously draws on perceptual learning from the external speech environment.

The amount of retrieval support modulates age effects on episodic memory: evidence from event-related potentials.

This experiment was designed to explore the impact of age and amount of retrieval support on episodic memory and its electrophysiological correlates. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while young and older participants performed a word-stem cued-recall task in a low-support condition (LSC) in which the stem was composed of three letters, and a high-support condition (HSC) in which the cue consisted of four letters. Behavioral analyses showed that recall in the older group was less accurate than in the young group in the LSC, but no age differences were observed in the HSC. In the LSC, old/new ERP effects at frontal and parietal sites were later and less sustained for the older adults. Furthermore, the parietal old/new effect was symmetrically distributed for older adults, whereas it was predominant over the left hemisphere for their younger counterparts. In addition, young participants demonstrated early and long-lasting frontal and parietal effects in the HSC but with predominance over the right hemisphere, whereas the older adults exhibited a frontal effect and an early and long-lasting parietal effect becoming predominant over the left hemisphere. No age differences in the time course of the parietal old/new effect were observed in this more supportive condition. In addition, in the last period, the left parietal effect was greater for the older group. This study suggests that episodic memory performance and ERP correlates of recall processes are more similar between young and older adults when increased support is provided at retrieval.