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.

Optimising refugee children's health/wellbeing in preparation for primary and secondary school: a qualitative inquiry.

BACKGROUND: Children from refugee backgrounds are less likely to access appropriate health and social care than non-refugee children. Our aim was to identify refugee children's health/wellbeing strengths and needs, and the barriers and enablers to accessing services while preparing for primary and secondary school, in a low socio-economic multicultural community in Australia. METHOD: Ten focus groups were facilitated with Arabic-speaking refugee parents of children aged 2-5 years (n = 11) or in first year secondary school (n = 22); refugee adolescents starting high school (n = 16); and key service providers to refugee families (n = 27). Vignettes about a healthy child and a child with difficulties guided the discussions. Data was thematically analysed and feedback sought from the community via the World Café method. RESULTS: Personal resilience and strong family systems were identified as strengths. Mental health was identified as a complex primary need; and whilst refugees were aware of available services, there were issues in knowing how to access them. Opportunities for play/socialisation were recognised as unmet adolescent needs. Adults spoke of a need to support integration of "old" and "new" cultural values. Parents identified community as facilitating health knowledge transfer for new arrivals; whilst stakeholders saw this as a barrier when systems change. Most parents had not heard of early childhood services, and reported difficulty accessing child healthcare. Preschooler parents identified the family "GP" as the main source of health support; whilst parents of adolescents valued their child's school. Health communication in written (not spoken) English was a significant roadblock. Differences in refugee family and service provider perceptions were also evident. CONCLUSIONS: Refugee families face challenges to accessing services, but also have strengths that enable them to optimise their children's wellbeing. Culturally-tailored models of care embedded within GP services and school systems may assist improved healthcare for refugee families.

Three-dimensional printable ultrasound transducer stabilization system.

When using ultrasound imaging of the tongue for speech recording/research, submental transducer stabilization is required to prevent the ultrasound transducer from translating or rotating in relation to the tongue. An iterative prototype of a lightweight three-dimensional-printable wearable ultrasound transducer stabilization system that allows flexible jaw motion and free head movement is presented. The system is completely non-metallic, eliminating interference with co-recorded signals, thus permitting co-collection and co-registration with articulometry systems. A motion study of the final version demonstrates that transducer rotation is limited to 1.25° and translation to 2.5 mm-well within accepted tolerances.

Developmental change in tone perception in Mandarin monolingual, English monolingual, and Mandarin-English bilingual infants: Divergences between monolingual and bilingual learners.

Most languages use lexical tone to discriminate the meanings of words. There has been recent interest in tracking the development of tone categories during infancy. These studies have focused largely on monolingual infants learning either a tone language or a non-tone language. It remains to be seen how bilingual infants learning one tone language (e.g., Mandarin) and one non-tone language (e.g., English) discriminate tones. Here, we examined infants' discrimination of two Mandarin tones pairs: one salient and one subtle. Discrimination was investigated in three groups: Mandarin-English bilinguals, English monolinguals, and Mandarin monolinguals at 6 months and 9 months of age in a cross-sectional design. Results demonstrated relatively strong Mandarin tone discrimination in Mandarin monolinguals, with salient tone discrimination at 6 months and both salient and subtle tone discrimination at 9 months. English monolinguals discriminated neither contrast at 6 months but discriminated the salient contrast at 9 months. Surprisingly, there was no evidence for tone discrimination in Mandarin-English bilingual infants. In a second experiment, 12- and 13-month-old Mandarin-English bilingual and English monolingual infants were tested to determine whether bilinguals would demonstrate tone sensitivity at a later age. Results revealed a lack of tone sensitivity at 12 or 13 months in bilingual infants, yet English monolingual infants were sensitive to both salient and subtle Mandarin tone contrasts at 12 or 13 months. Our findings provide evidence for age-related convergence in Mandarin tone discrimination in English and Mandarin monolingual infants and for a distinct pattern of tone discrimination in bilingual infants. Theoretical implications for phonetic category acquisition are discussed.

Consonantal timing and release burst acoustics distinguish multiple coronal stop place distinctions in Wubuy (Australia).

Substantial research has established that place of articulation of stop consonants (labial, alveolar, velar) are reliably differentiated using a number of acoustic measures such as closure duration, voice onset time (VOT), and spectral measures such as centre of gravity and the relative energy distribution in the mid-to-high spectral range of the burst. It is unclear, however, whether such measurable acoustic differences are present in multiple place of articulation contrasts among coronal stops. This article presents evidence from the highly endangered indigenous Australian language Wubuy, which maintains a 4-way coronal stop place contrast series in all word positions. The authors examine the temporal and burst characteristics of / t̪ t ʈ/ in three prosodic positions (utterance-initial, word-initial but phrase medial, and word-medial). The results indicate that VOT, closure duration, and the spectral quality of the burst may indeed differentiate multiple coronal place contrasts, in most positions, although measures that distinguish the apical contrast in absolute initial position remain elusive. The authors also examine measures (spectrum kurtosis, spectral tilt) previously used in other studies of multiple coronals in Australian languages. These results suggest that the authors' measures perform at least as well as those previously applied to multiple coronals in other Australian languages.

Corrigendum: Differential Difficulties in Perception of Tashlhiyt Berber Consonant Quantity Contrasts by Native Tashlhiyt Listeners vs. Berber-Naïve French Listeners.

[This corrects the article on p. 209 in vol. 7, PMID: 26973551.].

Differential Difficulties in Perception of Tashlhiyt Berber Consonant Quantity Contrasts by Native Tashlhiyt Listeners vs. Berber-Naïve French Listeners.

In a discrimination experiment on several Tashlhiyt Berber singleton-geminate contrasts, we find that French listeners encounter substantial difficulty compared to native speakers. Native listeners of Tashlhiyt perform near ceiling level on all contrasts. French listeners perform better on final contrasts such as fit-fitt than initial contrasts such as bi-bbi or sir-ssir. That is, French listeners are more sensitive to silent closure duration in word-final voiceless stops than to either voiced murmur or frication duration of fully voiced stops or voiceless fricatives in word-initial position. We propose, tentatively, that native speakers of French, a language in which gemination is usually not considered to be phonemic, have not acquired quantity contrasts but yet exhibit a presumably universal sensitivity to rhythm, whereby listeners are able to perceive and compare the relative temporal distance between beats given by successive salient phonetic events such as a sequence of vowel nuclei.

An examination of the different ways that non-native phones may be perceptually assimilated as uncategorized.

This study examined three ways that perception of non-native phones may be uncategorized relative to native (L1) categories: focalized (predominantly similar to a single L1 category), clustered (similar to > 2 L1 categories), and dispersed (not similar to any L1 categories). In an online study, Egyptian Arabic speakers residing in Egypt categorized and rated all Australian English vowels. Evidence was found to support focalized, clustered, and dispersed uncategorized assimilations. Second-language (L2) category formation for uncategorized assimilations is predicted to depend upon the degree of perceptual overlap between the sets of L1 categories listeners use in assimilating each phone within an L2 contrast.

Articulating What Infants Attune to in Native Speech.

To become language users, infants must embrace the integrality of speech perception and production. That they do so, and quite rapidly, is implied by the native-language attunement they achieve in each domain by 6-12 months. Yet research has most often addressed one or the other domain, rarely how they interrelate. Moreover, mainstream assumptions that perception relies on acoustic patterns whereas production involves motor patterns entail that the infant would have to translate incommensurable information to grasp the perception-production relationship. We posit the more parsimonious view that both domains depend on commensurate articulatory information. Our proposed framework combines principles of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and Articulatory Phonology (AP). According to PAM, infants attune to articulatory information in native speech and detect similarities of nonnative phones to native articulatory patterns. The AP premise that gestures of the speech organs are the basic elements of phonology offers articulatory similarity metrics while satisfying the requirement that phonological information be discrete and contrastive: (a) distinct articulatory organs produce vocal tract constrictions and (b) phonological contrasts recruit different articulators and/or constrictions of a given articulator that differ in degree or location. Various lines of research suggest young children perceive articulatory information, which guides their productions: discrimination of between- versus within-organ contrasts, simulations of attunement to language-specific articulatory distributions, multimodal speech perception, oral/vocal imitation, and perceptual effects of articulator activation or suppression. We conclude that articulatory gesture information serves as the foundation for developmental integrality of speech perception and production.

Discrimination of Multiple Coronal Stop Contrasts in Wubuy (Australia): A Natural Referent Consonant Account.

Native speech perception is generally assumed to be highly efficient and accurate. Very little research has, however, directly examined the limitations of native perception, especially for contrasts that are only minimally differentiated acoustically and articulatorily. Here, we demonstrate that native speech perception may indeed be more difficult than is often assumed, where phonemes are highly similar, and we address the nature and extremes of consonant perception. We present two studies of native and non-native (English) perception of the acoustically and articulatorily similar four-way coronal stop contrast /t ʈ [symbol: see text] ȶ/ (apico-alveolar, apico-retroflex, lamino-dental, lamino-alveopalatal) of Wubuy, an indigenous language of Australia. The results show that all listeners find contrasts involving /ȶ/ easy to discriminate, but that, for both groups, contrasts involving /t ʈ [symbol: see text]/ are much harder. Where the two groups differ, the results largely reflect native language (Wubuy vs English) attunement as predicted by the Perceptual Assimilation Model. We also observe striking perceptual asymmetries in the native listeners' perception of contrasts involving the latter three stops, likely due to the differences in input frequency. Such asymmetries have not previously been observed in adults, and we propose a novel Natural Referent Consonant Hypothesis to account for the results.

Super-imposing maxillary and palatal locations for electroarticulometry: A SIMPLE method.

This study proposes a method of superimposing a physical palatal profile, extracted from a speaker's maxillary impression, onto real-time mid-sagittal articulatory data. A palatal/dental profile is first obtained by three-dimensional-scanning the maxillary impression of the speaker. Then a high resolution mid-sagittal palatal line, extracted from the profile, is sub-divided into articulatory zones and superimposed, by Iterative Closest Point algorithm, onto reconstructed palatal traces in electromagnetic articulometric (EMA) data. Evaluations were carried out by comparing consonant targets elicited by EMA with the proposed method and by static palatography. The proposed method yields accurate results, as supported by palatography.

Perceptual assimilation of lexical tone: the roles of language experience and visual information.

Using Best's (1995) perceptual assimilation model (PAM), we investigated auditory-visual (AV), auditory-only (AO), and visual-only (VO) perception of Thai tones. Mandarin and Cantonese (tone-language) speakers were asked to categorize Thai tones according to their own native tone categories, and Australian English (non-tone-language) speakers to categorize Thai tones into their native intonation categories-for instance, question or statement. As comparisons, Thai participants completed a straightforward identification task, and another Australian English group identified the Thai tones using simple symbols. All of the groups also completed an AX discrimination task. Both the Mandarin and Cantonese groups categorized AO and AV Thai falling tones as their native level tones, and Thai rising tones as their native rising tones, although the Mandarin participants found it easier to categorize Thai level tones than did the Cantonese participants. VO information led to very poor categorization for all groups, and AO and AV information also led to very poor categorizations for the English intonation categorization group. PAM's predictions regarding tone discriminability based on these category assimilation patterns were borne out for the Mandarin group's AO and AV discriminations, providing support for the applicability of the PAM to lexical tones. For the Cantonese group, however, PAM was unable to account for one specific discrimination pattern-namely, their relatively good performance on the Thai high-rising contrast in the auditory conditions-and no predictions could be derived for the English groups. A full account of tone assimilation will likely need to incorporate considerations of phonetic, and even acoustic, similarity and overlap between nonnative and native tone categories.

Magnitude of phonetic distinction predicts success at early word learning in native and non-native accents.

Although infants perceptually attune to native vowels and consonants well before 12 months, at 13-15 months, they have difficulty learning to associate novel words that differ by their initial consonant (e.g., BIN and DIN) to their visual referents. However, this difficulty may not apply to all minimal pair novel words. While Canadian English (CE) 15-month-olds failed to respond to a switch from the newly learned word DEET to the novel non-word DOOT, they did notice a switch from DEET to DIT (Curtin et al., 2009). Those authors argued that early word learners capitalize on large phonetic differences, seen in CE DEET-DIT, but not on smaller phonetic differences, as in CE DEET-DOOT. To assess this hypothesis, we tested Australian English (AusE) 15-month-olds, as AusE has a smaller magnitude of phonetic difference in both novel word pairs. Two groups of infants were trained on the novel word DEET and tested on the vowel switches in DIT and DOOT, produced by an AusE female speaker or the same CE female speaker as in Curtin et al. (2009). If the size of the phonetic distinction plays a more central role than native accent experience in early word learning, AusE children should more easily recognize both of the unfamiliar but larger CE vowel switches than the more familiar but smaller AusE ones. The results support our phonetic-magnitude hypothesis: AusE children taught and tested with the CE-accented novel words looked longer to both of the switch test trials (DIT, DOOT) than same test trials (DEET), while those who heard the AusE-accented tokens did not notice either switch. Implications of our findings for models of early word learning are discussed.

Infant perceptual development for faces and spoken words: an integrated approach.

There are obvious differences between recognizing faces and recognizing spoken words or phonemes that might suggest development of each capability requires different skills. Recognizing faces and perceiving spoken language, however, are in key senses extremely similar endeavors. Both perceptual processes are based on richly variable, yet highly structured input from which the perceiver needs to extract categorically meaningful information. This similarity could be reflected in the perceptual narrowing that occurs within the first year of life in both domains. We take the position that the perceptual and neurocognitive processes by which face and speech recognition develop are based on a set of common principles. One common principle is the importance of systematic variability in the input as a source of information rather than noise. Experience of this variability leads to perceptual tuning to the critical properties that define individual faces or spoken words versus their membership in larger groupings of people and their language communities. We argue that parallels can be drawn directly between the principles responsible for the development of face and spoken language perception.

Perceptual assimilation and discrimination of non-native vowel contrasts.

Research on language-specific tuning in speech perception has focused mainly on consonants, while that on non-native vowel perception has failed to address whether the same principles apply. Therefore, non-native vowel perception was investigated here in light of relevant theoretical models: the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and the Natural Referent Vowel (NRV) framework. American-English speakers completed discrimination and native language assimilation (categorization and goodness rating) tests on six nonnative vowel contrasts. Discrimination was consistent with PAM assimilation types, but asymmetries predicted by NRV were only observed for single-category assimilations, suggesting that perceptual assimilation might modulate the effects of vowel peripherality on non-native vowel perception.

Investigating the role of articulatory organs and perceptual assimilation of native and non-native fricative place contrasts.

The perceptual assimilation model (PAM; Best, C. T. [1995]. A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research (pp. 171-204). Baltimore, MD: York Press.) accounts for developmental patterns of speech contrast discrimination by proposing that infants shift from untuned phonetic perception at 6 months to natively tuned perceptual assimilation at 11-12 months, but the model does not predict initial discrimination differences among contrasts. To address that issue, we evaluated the Articulatory Organ Hypothesis, which posits that consonants produced using different articulatory organs are initially easier to discriminate than those produced with the same articulatory organ. We tested English-learning 6- and 11-month-olds' discrimination of voiceless fricative place contrasts from Nuu-Chah-Nulth (non-native) and English (native), with one within-organ and one between-organ contrast from each language. Both native and non-native contrasts were discriminated across age, suggesting that articulatory-organ differences do not influence perception of speech contrasts by young infants. The results highlight the fact that a decline in discrimination for non-native contrasts does not always occur over age.

Expectations in culturally unfamiliar music: influences of proximal and distal cues and timbral characteristics.

Listeners' musical perception is influenced by cues that can be stored in short-term memory (e.g., within the same musical piece) or long-term memory (e.g., based on one's own musical culture). The present study tested how these cues (referred to as, respectively, proximal and distal cues) influence the perception of music from an unfamiliar culture. Western listeners who were naïve to Gamelan music judged completeness and coherence for newly constructed melodies in the Balinese gamelan tradition. In these melodies, we manipulated the final tone with three possibilities: the original gong tone, an in-scale tone replacement or an out-of-scale tone replacement. We also manipulated the musical timbre employed in Gamelan pieces. We hypothesized that novice listeners are sensitive to out-of-scale changes, but not in-scale changes, and that this might be influenced by the more unfamiliar timbre created by Gamelan "sister" instruments whose harmonics beat with the harmonics of the other instrument, creating a timbrally "shimmering" sound. The results showed: (1) out-of-scale endings were judged less complete than original gong and in-scale endings; (2) for melodies played with "sister" instruments, in-scale endings were judged as less complete than original endings. Furthermore, melodies using the original scale tones were judged more coherent than melodies containing few or multiple tone replacements; melodies played on single instruments were judged more coherent than the same melodies played on sister instruments. Additionally, there is some indication of within-session statistical learning, with expectations for the initially-novel materials developing during the course of the experiment. The data suggest the influence of both distal cues (e.g., previously unfamiliar timbres) and proximal cues (within the same sequence and over the experimental session) on the perception of melodies from other cultural systems based on unfamiliar tunings and scale systems.