TY - JOUR A1 - van Ommen, Sandrien A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Larraza, Saioa A1 - Wellmann, Caroline A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Language-specific prosodic acquisition BT - a comparison of phrase boundary perception by French- and German-learning infants JF - Journal of memory and language: JML N2 - This study compares the development of prosodic processing in French- and German-learning infants. The emergence of language-specific perception of phrase boundaries was directly tested using the same stimuli across these two languages. French-learning (Experiment 1, 2) and German-learning 6- and 8-month-olds (Experiment 3) listened to the same French noun sequences with or without major prosodic boundaries ([Loulou et Manou] [et Nina]; [Loulou et Manou et Nina], respectively). The boundaries were either naturally cued (Experiment 1), or cued exclusively by pitch and duration (Experiment 2, 3). French-learning 6- and 8-month-olds both perceived the natural boundary, but neither perceived the boundary when only two cues were present. In contrast, German-learning infants develop from not perceiving the two-cue boundary at 6 months to perceiving it at 8 months, just like German-learning 8-month-olds listening to German (Wellmann, Holzgrefe, Truckenbrodt, Wartenburger, & Hohle, 2012). In a control experiment (Experiment 4), we found little difference between German and French adult listeners, suggesting that later, French listeners catch up with German listeners. Taken together, these cross-linguistic differences in the perception of identical stimuli provide direct evidence for language-specific development of prosodic boundary perception. KW - Prosody KW - Acquisition KW - Language-specific KW - Perception KW - Infant KW - Prosodic boundaries Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104108 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 112 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krasotkina, Anna A1 - Götz, Antonia A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schwarzer, Gudrun T1 - Bimodal familiarization re-sensitizes 12-month-old infants to other-race faces JF - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal N2 - Perceptual narrowing in the domain of face perception typically begins to reduce infants' sensitivity to differences distinguishing other-race faces from approximately 6 months of age. The present study investigated whether it is possible to re-sensitize Caucasian 12-month-old infants to other-race Asian faces through statistical learning by familiarizing them with different statistical distributions of these faces. The familiarization faces were created by generating a morphed continuum from one Asian face identity to another. In the unimodal condition, infants were familiarized with a frequency distribution wherein they saw the midpoint face of the morphed continuum the most frequently. In the bimodal condition, infants were familiarized with a frequency distribution wherein they saw faces closer to the endpoints of the morphed continuum the most frequently. After familiarization, infants were tested on their discrimination of the two original Asian faces. The infants' looking times during the test indicated that infants in the bimodal condition could discriminate between the two faces, while infants in the unimodal condition could not. These findings therefore suggest that 12-month-old Caucasian infants could be re-sensitized to Asian faces by familiarizing them with a bimodal frequency distribution of such faces. KW - Bimodal KW - Unimodal KW - Familiarization KW - Statistical learning KW - Infant KW - Face KW - discrimination Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101502 SN - 0163-6383 SN - 1879-0453 VL - 62 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -