English and Mandarin native speakers' cue-weighting of lexical stress: Results from MMN and LDN.

Past research on how listeners weight stress cues such as pitch, duration and intensity has reported two inconsistent patternss: listeners' weighting conforms to 1) their native language experience (e.g., language rhythmicity, lexical tone), and 2) a general "iambic-trochaic law" (ITL), favouring innate sound groupings in cue perception. This study aims to tease apart the above effects by investigating the weighting of pitch, duration and intensity cues in stress-timed (Australian English) and non-stress-timed and tonal (Taiwan Mandarin) language speaking adults using a mismatch negativity (MMN) multi-feature paradigm. Results show effects that can be explained by language-specific rhythmic influence, but only partially by the ITL. Moreover, these findings revealed cross-linguistic differences indexed by both MMN and late discriminative negativity (LDN) responses at cue and syllable position levels, and thus call for more sophisticated perspectives for existing cue-weighting models.

Suitability of vocabulary assessments: Comparing child scores and parent perspectives on communicative inventories for Aboriginal families in Western Sydney.

Purpose: Standardised testing tools within an Aboriginal Australian context have been found to produce inaccurate results due to language and cultural differences. The primary aim of the study is to compare Aboriginal children's scores in urban NSW across two language assessment tools: the Early Language Inventory (ERLI) and the Australian English Communicative Development Inventory, short form (OZI-SF). These tools are vocabulary checklists for children aged approximately 12-30 months. OZI-SF is an Australian tool for mainstream use and ERLI has been developed with and for Aboriginal families, but not in urban contexts, so its suitability there is unknown, given the great cultural and linguistic diversity among Aboriginal people across Australia. The second aim is to identify which tool is more culturally appropriate for urban Aboriginal families through parent perspectives.Method: Overall, 30 parents (of 31 children) participated in the study to complete the ERLI, and 14 parents from this sample completed both the ERLI and OZI-SF and interviews to explore child scores and parent perspectives, in a mixed methods approach.Result: Aboriginal children (N = 14) scored higher on the ERLI than the OZI-SF. Gender and age were significant contributors to the scores as scores were higher for older children and higher for girls than boys. In answer to the second aim, four themes emerged to explain parental perspectives and their preference for the ERLI, which supported connection to culture and language.Conclusion: Findings have implications for paediatric language assessments with urban Aboriginal families in clinical, educational and research settings.

A short-form version of the Australian English Communicative Development Inventory.

Purpose: The Australian English Communicative Development Inventory (OZI) is a 558-item parent report tool for assessing language development at 12-30 months. Here, we introduce the short form (OZI-SF), a 100-item, picture-supported, online instrument with substantially lower time and literacy demands.Method: In tool development (Study 1), 95 items were drawn from the OZI to match its item distribution by age of acquisition and semantic categories. Five items were added from four other semantic categories, plus 12 gestures and six games/routines. Simulations computed OZI-SF scores from existing long-form OZI norm data, and OZI and projected OZI-SF scores were correlated. In an independent norming sample (Study 2), parents (n = 230) completed the OZI-SF for their children aged 12-30 months. Child scores were analysed by age and sex.Result: OZI-SF and OZI scores correlate highly across age and language development levels. Vocabulary scores (receptive, expressive) correlate with age and the median for girls is higher until 24 months. By 24 months, 50% of the sample combine words "often". The median time to OZI-SF completion was 12 minutes.Conclusion: Fitted percentiles permit working guidelines for typical (median) performance and lower cut-offs for children who may be behind on age-based expectations and/or at risk for a communication difficulty. The OZI-SF is a short-form of the OZI that has promise for research and clinical/educational use with Australian families.

Developing a parent vocabulary checklist for young Indigenous children growing up multilingual in the Katherine region of Australia's Northern Territory.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop a checklist to assess vocabulary development in Indigenous Australian children, with a local focus on Indigenous Australian children growing up in the towns and communities of the Katherine Region in the Northern Territory of Australia. In this region, many families are multilingual and/or multidialectal and children's home languages include varieties of Aboriginal English, Kriol, traditional Aboriginal languages, and/or other languages.Method: Over four years, a checklist was iteratively developed from parent interviews, comparisons of potential items to the content and structure of the Communicative Development Inventories (CDI): Words & Gestures (Short Form), team discussions and pilot testing with 33 parents of infants aged 0-4 years.Result: The Early Language Inventory (ERLI) checklist offers new content compared with the CDI: Words & Gestures (short form) and the OZI (Australian English CDI, long form). Initial data from 33 parents suggests the checklist has desirable features: scores correlated positively with age and related to word combining, reaching ceiling around 3 years of age for many children. Infants whose parents had concerns tended to have lower scores.Conclusion: ERLI is a new local adaptation of the CDI (Words & Gestures) for assessing early communication among Indigenous infants growing up in the Katherine region of the Northern Territory, Australia.

Depression Following Major Life Transitions in Women: A Review and Theory.

Depression can occur due to common major life transitions, such as giving birth, menopause, retirement, empty-nest transition, and midlife crisis. Although some of these transitions are perceived as positive (e.g., giving birth), they may still lead to depression. We conducted a systematic literature review of the factors underlying the occurrence of depression following major life transition in some individuals. This review shows that major common life transitions can cause depression if they are sudden, major, and lead to loss (or change) of life roles (e.g., no longer doing motherly or fatherly chores after children leave family home). Accordingly, we provide a theoretical framework that explains depression caused by transitions in women. One of the most potential therapeutic methods of ameliorating depression associated with life transitions is either helping individuals accept their new roles (e.g., accepting new role as a mother to ameliorate postpartum depression symptoms) or providing them with novel life roles (e.g., volunteering after retirement or children leave family home) may help them overcome their illness.

A program to respond to otitis media in remote Australian Aboriginal communities: a qualitative investigation of parent perspectives.

BACKGROUND: Indigenous infants and children in Australia, especially in remote communities, experience early and chronic otitis media (OM) which is difficult to treat and has lifelong impacts in health and education. The LiTTLe Program (Learning to Talk, Talking to Learn) aimed to increase infants' access to spoken language input, teach parents to manage health and hearing problems, and support children's school readiness. This paper aimed to explore caregivers' views about this inclusive, parent-implemented early childhood program for 0-3 years in an Aboriginal community health context. METHODS: Data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 9 caregivers of 12 children who had participated in the program from one remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory are presented. Data were analysed thematically. Caregivers provided overall views on the program. In addition, three key areas of focus in the program are also presented here: speech and language, hearing health, and school readiness. RESULTS: Caregivers were positive about the interactive speech and language strategies in the program, except for some strategies which some parents found alien or difficult: such as talking slowly, following along with the child's topic, using parallel talk, or baby talk. Children's hearing was considered by caregivers to be important for understanding people, enjoying music, and detecting environmental sounds including signs of danger. Caregivers provided perspectives on the utility of sign language and its benefits for communicating with infants and young children with hearing loss, and the difficulty of getting young community children to wear a conventional hearing aid. Caregivers were strongly of the opinion that the program had helped prepare children for school through familiarising their child with early literacy activities and resources, as well as school routines. But caregivers differed as to whether they thought the program should have been located at the school itself. CONCLUSIONS: The caregivers generally reported positive views about the LiTTLe Program, and also drew attention to areas for improvement. The perspectives gathered may serve to guide other cross-sector collaborations across health and education to respond to OM among children at risk for OM-related disability in speech and language development.

Constraints on Tone Sensitivity in Novel Word Learning by Monolingual and Bilingual Infants: Tone Properties Are More Influential than Tone Familiarity.

This study compared tone sensitivity in monolingual and bilingual infants in a novel word learning task. Tone language learning infants (Experiment 1, Mandarin monolingual; Experiment 2, Mandarin-English bilingual) were tested with Mandarin (native) or Thai (non-native) lexical tone pairs which contrasted static vs. dynamic (high vs. rising) tones or dynamic vs. dynamic (rising vs. falling) tones. Non-tone language, English-learning infants (Experiment 3) were tested on English intonational contrasts or the Mandarin or Thai tone contrasts. Monolingual Mandarin language infants were able to bind tones to novel words for the Mandarin High-Rising contrast, but not for the Mandarin Rising-Falling contrast; and they were insensitive to both the High-Rising and the Rising-Falling tone contrasts in Thai. Bilingual English-Mandarin infants were similar to the Mandarin monolinguals in that they were sensitive to the Mandarin High-Rising contrast and not to the Mandarin Rising-Falling contrast. However, unlike the Mandarin monolinguals, they were also sensitive to the High Rising contrast in Thai. Monolingual English learning infants were insensitive to all three types of contrasts (Mandarin, Thai, English), although they did respond differentially to tone-bearing vs. intonation-marked words. Findings suggest that infants' sensitivity to tones in word learning contexts depends heavily on tone properties, and that this influence is, in some cases, stronger than effects of language familiarity. Moreover, bilingual infants demonstrated greater phonological flexibility in tone interpretation.

Gavagai is as Gavagai does: learning nouns and verbs from cross-situational statistics.

Learning to map words onto their referents is difficult, because there are multiple possibilities for forming these mappings. Cross-situational learning studies have shown that word-object mappings can be learned across multiple situations, as can verbs when presented in a syntactic context. However, these previous studies have presented either nouns or verbs in ambiguous contexts and thus bypass much of the complexity of multiple grammatical categories in speech. We show that noun word learning in adults is robust when objects are moving, and that verbs can also be learned from similar scenes without additional syntactic information. Furthermore, we show that both nouns and verbs can be acquired simultaneously, thus resolving category-level as well as individual word-level ambiguity. However, nouns were learned more quickly than verbs, and we discuss this in light of previous studies investigating the noun advantage in word learning.

The role of sound symbolism in language learning.

Certain correspondences between the sound and meaning of words can be observed in subsets of the vocabulary. These sound-symbolic relationships have been suggested to result in easier language acquisition, but previous studies have explicitly tested effects of sound symbolism on learning category distinctions but not on word learning. In 2 word learning experiments, we varied the extent to which phonological properties related to a rounded-angular shape distinction and we distinguished learning of categories from learning of individual words. We found that sound symbolism resulted in an advantage for learning categories of sound-shape mappings but did not assist in learning individual word meanings. These results are consistent with the limited presence of sound symbolism in natural language. The results also provide a reinterpretation of the role of sound symbolism in language learning and language origins and a greater specification of the conditions under which sound symbolism proves advantageous for learning.

Integrating constraints for learning word-referent mappings.

Learning word-referent mappings is complex because the word and its referent tend to co-occur with multiple other words and potential referents. Such complexity has led to proposals for a host of constraints on learning, though how these constraints may interact has not yet been investigated in detail. In this paper, we investigated interactions between word co-occurrence constraints and cross-situational statistics in word learning. Analyses of child-directed speech revealed that when both object-referring and non-referring words occurred in the utterance, referring words were more likely to be preceded by a determiner than when the utterance contained only referring words. In a word learning study containing both referring and non-referring words, learning was facilitated when non-referring words contributed grammatical constraints analogous to determiners. The complexity of multi-word utterances provides an opportunity for co-occurrence constraints to contribute to word-referent mapping, and the learning mechanism is able to integrate these multiple sources of information.

Preverbal infants' sensitivity to synaesthetic cross-modality correspondences.

Stimulation of one sensory modality can induce perceptual experiences in another modality that reflect synaesthetic correspondences among different dimensions of sensory experience. In visual-hearing synaesthesia, for example, higher pitched sounds induce visual images that are brighter, smaller, higher in space, and sharper than those induced by lower pitched sounds. Claims that neonatal perception is synaesthetic imply that such correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception. To date, the youngest children in whom such correspondences have been confirmed with any certainty were 2- to 3-year-olds. We examined preferential looking to assess 3- to 4-month-old preverbal infants' sensitivity to the correspondences linking auditory pitch to visuospatial height and visual sharpness. The infants looked longer at a changing visual display when this was accompanied by a sound whose changing pitch was congruent, rather than incongruent, with these correspondences. This is the strongest indication to date that synaesthetic cross-modality correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception.

The first steps in word learning are easier when the shoes fit: comparing monolingual and bilingual infants.

English, French, and bilingual English-French 17-month-old infants were compared for their performance on a word learning task using the Switch task. Object names presented a /b/ vs. /g/ contrast that is phonemic in both English and French, and auditory strings comprised English and French pronunciations by an adult bilingual. Infants were habituated to two novel objects labeled 'bowce' or 'gowce' and were then presented with a switch trial where a familiar word and familiar object were paired in a novel combination, and a same trial with a familiar word-object pairing. Bilingual infants looked significantly longer to switch vs. same trials, but English and French monolinguals did not, suggesting that bilingual infants can learn word-object associations when the phonetic conditions favor their input. Monolingual infants likely failed because the bilingual mode of presentation increased phonetic variability and did not match their real-world input. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis by presenting monolingual infants with nonce word tokens restricted to native language pronunciations. Monolinguals succeeded in this case. Experiment 3 revealed that the presence of unfamiliar pronunciations in Experiment 2, rather than a reduction in overall phonetic variability was the key factor to success, as French infants failed when tested with English pronunciations of the nonce words. Thus phonetic variability impacts how infants perform in the switch task in ways that contribute to differences in monolingual and bilingual performance. Moreover, both monolinguals and bilinguals are developing adaptive speech processing skills that are specific to the language(s) they are learning.

The developmental course of lexical tone perception in the first year of life.

Perceptual reorganisation of infants' speech perception has been found from 6 months for consonants and earlier for vowels. Recently, similar reorganisation has been found for lexical tone between 6 and 9 months of age. Given that there is a close relationship between vowels and tones, this study investigates whether the perceptual reorganisation for tone begins earlier than 6 months. Non-tone language English and French infants were tested with the Thai low vs. rising lexical tone contrast, using the stimulus alternating preference procedure. Four- and 6-month-old infants discriminated the lexical tones, and there was no decline in discrimination performance across these ages. However, 9-month-olds failed to discriminate the lexical tones. This particular pattern of decline in nonnative tone discrimination over age indicates that perceptual reorganisation for tone does not parallel the developmentally prior decline observed in vowel perception. The findings converge with previous developmental cross-language findings on tone perception in English-language infants [Mattock, K., & Burnham, D. (2006). Chinese and English infants' tone perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization. Infancy, 10(3)], and extend them by showing similar perceptual reorganisation for non-tone language infants learning rhythmically different non-tone languages (English and French).

Developmental and cross-linguistic variation in the infant vowel space: the case of Canadian English and Canadian French.

This article describes the results of two experiments. Experiment 1 was a cross-sectional study designed to explore developmental and cross-linguistic variation in the vowel space of 10- to 18-month-old infants, exposed to either Canadian English or Canadian French. Acoustic parameters of the infant vowel space were described (specifically the mean and standard deviation of the first and second formant frequencies) and then used to derive the grave, acute, compact, and diffuse features of the vowel space across age. A decline in mean F1 with age for French-learning infants and a decline in mean F2 with age for English-learning infants was observed. A developmental expansion of the vowel space into the high-front and high-back regions was also evident. In experiment 2, the Variable Linear Articulatory Model was used to model the infant vowel space taking into consideration vocal tract size and morphology. Two simulations were performed, one with full range of movement for all articulatory paramenters, and the other for movement of jaw and lip parameters only. These simulated vowel spaces were used to aid in the interpretation of the developmental changes and cross-linguistic influences on vowel production in experiment 1.