@article{WellmannHolzgrefeLangTruckenbrodtetal.2012, author = {Wellmann, Caroline and Holzgrefe-Lang, Julia and Truckenbrodt, Hubert and Wartenburger, Isabell and H{\"o}hle, Barbara}, title = {How each prosodic boundary cue matters evidence from German infants}, series = {Frontiers in psychology}, volume = {3}, journal = {Frontiers in psychology}, publisher = {Frontiers Research Foundation}, address = {Lausanne}, issn = {1664-1078}, doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00580}, pages = {13}, year = {2012}, abstract = {Previous studies have revealed that infants aged 6-10 months are able to use the acoustic correlates of major prosodic boundaries, that is, pitch change, preboundary lengthening, and pause, for the segmentation of the continuous speech signal. Moreover, investigations with American-English- and Dutch-learning infants suggest that processing prosodic boundary markings involves a weighting of these cues. This weighting seems to develop with increasing exposure to the native language and to underlie crosslinguistic variation. In the following, we report the results of four experiments using the headturn preference procedure to explore the perception of prosodic boundary cues in German infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with a sequence of names in two different prosodic groupings, with or without boundary markers. Infants discriminated both sequences when the boundary was marked by all three cues (Experiment 1) and when it was marked by a pitch change and preboundary lengthening in combination (Experiment 2). The presence of a pitch change (Experiment 3) or preboundary lengthening (Experiment 4) as single cues did not lead to a successful discrimination. Our results indicate that pause is not a necessary cue for German infants. Pitch change and preboundary lengthening in combination, but not as single cues, are sufficient. Hence, by 8 months infants only rely on a convergence of boundary markers. Comparisons with adults' performance on the same stimulus materials suggest that the pattern observed with the 8-month-olds is already consistent with that of adults. We discuss our findings with respect to crosslinguistic variation and the development of a language-specific prosodic cue weighting.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Wellmann2023, author = {Wellmann, Caroline}, title = {Early sensitivity to prosodic phrase boundary cues: Behavioral evidence from German-learning infants}, doi = {10.25932/publishup-57393}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-573937}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {xii, 136}, year = {2023}, abstract = {This dissertation seeks to shed light on the relation of phrasal prosody and developmental speech perception in German-learning infants. Three independent empirical studies explore the role of acoustic correlates of major prosodic boundaries, specifically pitch change, final lengthening, and pause, in infant boundary perception. Moreover, it was examined whether the sensitivity to prosodic phrase boundary markings changes during the first year of life as a result of perceptual attunement to the ambient language (Aslin \& Pisoni, 1980). Using the headturn preference procedure six- and eight-month-old monolingual German-learning infants were tested on their discrimination of two different prosodic groupings of the same list of coordinated names either with or without an internal IPB after the second name, that is, [Moni und Lilli] [und Manu] or [Moni und Lilli und Manu]. The boundary marking was systematically varied with respect to single prosodic cues or specific cue combinations. Results revealed that six- and eight-month-old German-learning infants successfully detect the internal prosodic boundary when it is signaled by all the three main boundary cues pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. For eight-, but not for six-month-olds, the combination of pitch change and final lengthening, without the occurrence of a pause, is sufficient. This mirrors an adult-like perception by eight-months (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016). Six-month-olds detect a prosodic phrase boundary signaled by final lengthening and pause. The findings suggest a developmental change in German prosodic boundary cue perception from a strong reliance on the pause cue at six months to a differentiated sensitivity to the more subtle cues pitch change and final lengthening at eight months. Neither for six- nor for eight-month-olds the occurrence of pitch change or final lengthening as single cues is sufficient, similar to what has been observed for adult speakers of German (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016). The present dissertation provides new scientific knowledge on infants' sensitivity to individual prosodic phrase boundary cues in the first year of life. Methodologically, the studies are pathbreaking since they used exactly the same stimulus materials - phonologically thoroughly controlled lists of names - that have also been used with adults (Holzgrefe-Lang et al., 2016) and with infants in a neurophysiological paradigm (Holzgrefe-Lang, Wellmann, H{\"o}hle, \& Wartenburger, 2018), allowing for comparisons across age (six/ eight months and adults) and method (behavioral vs. neurophysiological methods). Moreover, materials are suited to be transferred to other languages allowing for a crosslinguistic comparison. Taken together with a study with similar French materials (van Ommen et al., 2020) the observed change in sensitivity in German-learning infants can be interpreted as a language-specific one, from an initial language-general processing mechanism that primarily focuses on the presence of pauses to a language-specific processing that takes into account prosodic properties available in the ambient language. The developmental pattern is discussed as an interplay of acoustic salience, prosodic typology (prosodic regularity) and cue reliability.}, language = {en} } @misc{vanderKantBiroLeveltetal.2018, author = {van der Kant, Anne and Biro, Szilvia and Levelt, Claartje and Huijbregts, Stephan}, title = {Negative affect is related to reduced differential neural responses to social and non-social stimuli in 5-to-8-month-old infants}, series = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe}, journal = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe}, number = {643}, issn = {1866-8364}, doi = {10.25932/publishup-46813}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-468136}, pages = {23 -- 30}, year = {2018}, abstract = {Both social perception and temperament in young infants have been related to social functioning later in life. Previous functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) data (Lloyd-Fox et al., 2009) showed larger blood-oxygenation changes for social compared to non-social stimuli in the posterior temporal cortex of five-month-old infants. We sought to replicate and extend these findings by using fNIRS to study the neural basis of social perception in relation to infant temperament (Negative Affect) in 37 five-to-eight-month-old infants. Infants watched short videos displaying either hand and facial movements of female actors (social dynamic condition) or moving toys and machinery (non-social dynamic condition), while fNIRS data were collected over temporal brain regions. Negative Affect was measured using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire. Results showed significantly larger blood-oxygenation changes in the right posterior-temporal region in the social compared to the non-social condition. Furthermore, this differential activation was smaller in infants showing higher Negative Affect. Our results replicate those of Lloyd-Fox et al. and confirmed that five-to-eight-month-old infants show cortical specialization for social perception. Furthermore, the decreased cortical sensitivity to social stimuli in infants showing high Negative Affect may be an early biomarker for later difficulties in social interaction.}, language = {en} } @article{TelkemeyerRossiNierhausetal.2011, author = {Telkemeyer, Silke and Rossi, Sonja and Nierhaus, Till and Steinbrink, Jens and Obrig, Hellmuth and Wartenburger, Isabell}, title = {Acoustic processing of temporally modulated sounds in infants evidence from a combined near-infrared spectroscopy and EEG study}, series = {Frontiers in psychology}, volume = {2}, journal = {Frontiers in psychology}, number = {2}, publisher = {Frontiers Research Foundation}, address = {Lausanne}, issn = {1664-1078}, doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00062}, pages = {14}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Speech perception requires rapid extraction of the linguistic content from the acoustic signal. The ability to efficiently process rapid changes in auditory information is important for decoding speech and thereby crucial during language acquisition. Investigating functional networks of speech perception in infancy might elucidate neuronal ensembles supporting perceptual abilities that gate language acquisition. Interhemispheric specializations for language have been demonstrated in infants. How these asymmetries are shaped by basic temporal acoustic properties is under debate. We recently provided evidence that newborns process non-linguistic sounds sharing temporal features with language in a differential and lateralized fashion. The present study used the same material while measuring brain responses of 6 and 3 month old infants using simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS reveals that the lateralization observed in newborns remains constant over the first months of life. While fast acoustic modulations elicit bilateral neuronal activations, slow modulations lead to right-lateralized responses. Additionally, auditory-evoked potentials and oscillatory EEG responses show differential responses for fast and slow modulations indicating a sensitivity for temporal acoustic variations. Oscillatory responses reveal an effect of development, that is, 6 but not 3 month old infants show stronger theta-band desynchronization for slowly modulated sounds. Whether this developmental effect is due to increasing fine-grained perception for spectrotemporal sounds in general remains speculative. Our findings support the notion that a more general specialization for acoustic properties can be considered the basis for lateralization of speech perception. The results show that concurrent assessment of vascular based imaging and electrophysiological responses have great potential in the research on language acquisition.}, language = {en} } @article{SchmitzHoehleMuelleretal.2006, author = {Schmitz, Michaela and H{\"o}hle, Barbara and M{\"u}ller, Anja and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-learning infants from 4 to 14 months}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19566}, year = {2006}, abstract = {The aim of the present study was to elucidate in a study with 4-, 6-, 8-, and 14-month-old German-learning children, when and how they may acquire the regularities which underlie Focus-to-Stress Alignment (FSA) in the target language, that is, how prosody is associated with specific communicative functions. Our findings suggest, that 14-month-olds have already found out that German allows for variable focus positions, after having gone through a development which goes from a predominantly prosodically driven processing of the input to a processing where prosody interacts more and more with the growing lexical and syntactic knowledge of the child.}, language = {en} } @misc{OttHoehle2013, author = {Ott, Susan and H{\"o}hle, Barbara}, title = {Verb inflection in German-learning children with typical and atypical language acquisition}, series = {Journal of Child Language}, journal = {Journal of Child Language}, number = {530}, issn = {1866-8364}, doi = {10.1017/S030500091200027X}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-416475}, pages = {24}, year = {2013}, abstract = {Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production of inflected nonce verb forms (3 rd person singular with -t suffix) with either high- or low-frequency subsyllables was tested in sixteen German-learning children with SLI (ages 4;1-5 ;1), sixteen TD-children matched for chronological age (CA) and fourteen TD- children matched for verbal age (VA) (ages 3;0-3 ;11). The findings revealed that children with SLI, but not CA- or VA-children, showed differential performance between the two types of verbs, producing more inflectional errors when the verb forms resulted in low-frequency subsyllables than when they resulted in high-frequency subsyllables, replicating the results from English-learning children.}, language = {en} } @article{OttHoehle2011, author = {Ott, Susan and H{\"o}hle, Barbara}, title = {Verb inflection in German-learning children with typical and atypical language acquisition}, series = {Journal of child language}, volume = {40}, journal = {Journal of child language}, number = {1}, publisher = {Cambridge University Press}, address = {New York}, issn = {0305-0009}, doi = {10.1017/S030500091200027X}, pages = {169 -- 192}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production of inflected nonce verb forms (3rd person singular with - t suffix) with either high-or low-frequency subsyllables was tested in sixteen German-learning children with SLI (ages 4;1-5;1), sixteen TD-children matched for chronological age (CA) and fourteen TD-children matched for verbal age (VA) (ages 3;0-3;11). The findings revealed that children with SLI, but not CA-or VA-children, showed differential performance between the two types of verbs, producing more inflectional errors when the verb forms resulted in low-frequency subsyllables than when they resulted in high-frequency subsyllables, replicating the results from English-learning children.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{HolzgrefeLang2017, author = {Holzgrefe-Lang, Julia}, title = {Prosodic phrase boundary perception in adults and infants}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-405943}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {VIII, 141}, year = {2017}, abstract = {Prosody is a rich source of information that heavily supports spoken language comprehension. In particular, prosodic phrase boundaries divide the continuous speech stream into chunks reflecting the semantic and syntactic structure of an utterance. This chunking or prosodic phrasing plays a critical role in both spoken language processing and language acquisition. Aiming at a better understanding of the underlying processing mechanisms and their acquisition, the present work investigates factors that influence prosodic phrase boundary perception in adults and infants. Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, three experimental studies examined the role of prosodic context (i.e., phrase length) in German phrase boundary perception and of the main prosodic boundary cues, namely pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. With regard to the boundary cues, the dissertation focused on the questions which cues or cue combination are essential for the perception of a prosodic boundary and on whether and how this cue weighting develops during infancy. Using ERPs is advantageous because the technique captures the immediate impact of (linguistic) information during on-line processing. Moreover, as it can be applied independently of specific task demands or an overt response performance, it can be used with both infants and adults. ERPs are particularly suitable to study the time course and underlying mechanisms of boundary perception, because a specific ERP component, the Closure Positive Shift (CPS) is well established as neuro-physiological indicator of prosodic boundary perception in adults. The results of the three experimental studies first underpin that the prosodic context plays an immediate role in the processing of prosodic boundary information. Moreover, the second study reveals that adult listeners perceive a prosodic boundary also on the basis of a sub-set of the boundary cues available in the speech signal. Both ERP and simultaneously collected behavioral data (i.e., prosodic judgements) suggest that the combination of pitch change and final lengthening triggers boundary perception; however, when presented as single cues, neither pitch change nor final lengthening were sufficient. Finally, testing six- and eight-month-old infants shows that the early sensitivity for prosodic information is reflected in a brain response resembling the adult CPS. For both age groups, brain responses to prosodic boundaries cued by pitch change and final lengthening revealed a positivity that can be interpreted as a CPS-like infant ERP component. In contrast, but comparable to the adults' response pattern, pitch change as a single cue does not provoke an infant CPS. These results show that infant phrase boundary perception is not exclusively based on pause detection and hint at an early ability to exploit subtle, relational prosodic cues in speech perception.}, language = {en} } @misc{BijeljacBabicHoehleNazzi2016, author = {Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka and H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Nazzi, Thierry}, title = {Early prosodic acquisition in bilingual infants}, series = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe}, journal = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe}, number = {435}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-407225}, pages = {8}, year = {2016}, abstract = {Infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language before 12 months, as shown by the emergence of a trochaic bias in English-learning infants between 6 and 9 months (Jusczyk et al., 1993), and in German-learning infants between 4 and 6 months (Huhle et al., 2009, 2014), while French-learning infants do not show a bias at 6 months (Hohle et al., 2009). This language-specific emergence of a trochaic bias is supported by the fact that English and German are languages with trochaic predominance in their lexicons, while French is a language with phrase-final lengthening but lacking lexical stress. We explored the emergence of a trochaic bias in bilingual French/German infants, to study whether the developmental trajectory would be similar to monolingual infants and whether amount of relative exposure to the two languages has an impact on the emergence of the bias. Accordingly, we replicated Hohle et al. (2009) with 24 bilingual 6-month-olds learning French and German simultaneously. All infants had been exposed to both languages for 30 to 70\% of the time from birth. Using the Head Preference Procedure, infants were presented with two lists of stimuli, one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /GAba/ with word-initial stress (trochaic pattern), the second one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /gaBA/ with word-final stress (iambic pattern). The stimuli were recorded by a native German female speaker. Results revealed that these French/German bilingual 6-month olds have a trochaic bias (as evidenced by a preference to listen to the trochaic pattern). Hence, their listening preference is comparable to that of monolingual German-learning 6-month-olds, but differs from that of monolingual French-learning 6-month-olds who did not show any preference (Noble et al., 2009). Moreover, the size of the trochaic bias in the bilingual infants was not correlated with their amount of exposure to German. The present results thus establish that the development of a trochaic bias in simultaneous bilinguals is not delayed compared to monolingual German-learning infants (Hohle et al., 2009) and is rather independent of the amount of exposure to German relative to French.}, language = {en} } @article{BijeljacBabicHoehleNazzi2016, author = {Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka and H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Nazzi, Thierry}, title = {Early Prosodic Acquisition in Bilingual Infants: The Case of the Perceptual Trochaic Bias}, series = {Frontiers in psychology}, volume = {7}, journal = {Frontiers in psychology}, publisher = {Frontiers Research Foundation}, address = {Lausanne}, issn = {1664-1078}, doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00210}, pages = {1753 -- 1802}, year = {2016}, abstract = {Infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language before 12 months, as shown by the emergence of a trochaic bias in English-learning infants between 6 and 9 months (Jusczyk et al., 1993), and in German-learning infants between 4 and 6 months (Huhle et al., 2009, 2014), while French-learning infants do not show a bias at 6 months (Hohle et al., 2009). This language-specific emergence of a trochaic bias is supported by the fact that English and German are languages with trochaic predominance in their lexicons, while French is a language with phrase-final lengthening but lacking lexical stress. We explored the emergence of a trochaic bias in bilingual French/German infants, to study whether the developmental trajectory would be similar to monolingual infants and whether amount of relative exposure to the two languages has an impact on the emergence of the bias. Accordingly, we replicated Hohle et al. (2009) with 24 bilingual 6-month-olds learning French and German simultaneously. All infants had been exposed to both languages for 30 to 70\% of the time from birth. Using the Head Preference Procedure, infants were presented with two lists of stimuli, one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /GAba/ with word-initial stress (trochaic pattern), the second one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /gaBA/ with word-final stress (iambic pattern). The stimuli were recorded by a native German female speaker. Results revealed that these French/German bilingual 6-month olds have a trochaic bias (as evidenced by a preference to listen to the trochaic pattern). Hence, their listening preference is comparable to that of monolingual German-learning 6-month-olds, but differs from that of monolingual French-learning 6-month-olds who did not show any preference (Noble et al., 2009). Moreover, the size of the trochaic bias in the bilingual infants was not correlated with their amount of exposure to German. The present results thus establish that the development of a trochaic bias in simultaneous bilinguals is not delayed compared to monolingual German-learning infants (Hohle et al., 2009) and is rather independent of the amount of exposure to German relative to French.}, language = {en} }