TY - JOUR A1 - Abboub, Nawal A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Bhatara, Anjali A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - An Exploration of Rhythmic Grouping of Speech Sequences by French- and German-Learning Infants JF - Frontiers in human neuroscienc N2 - Rhythm in music and speech can be characterized by a constellation of several acoustic cues. Individually, these cues have different effects on rhythmic perception: sequences of sounds alternating in duration are perceived as short-long pairs (weak-strong/iambic pattern), whereas sequences of sounds alternating in intensity or pitch are perceived as loud-soft, or high-low pairs (strong-weak/trochaic pattern). This perceptual bias—called the Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL)–has been claimed to be an universal property of the auditory system applying in both the music and the language domains. Recent studies have shown that language experience can modulate the effects of the ITL on rhythmic perception of both speech and non-speech sequences in adults, and of non-speech sequences in 7.5-month-old infants. The goal of the present study was to explore whether language experience also modulates infants’ grouping of speech. To do so, we presented sequences of syllables to monolingual French- and German-learning 7.5-month-olds. Using the Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP), we examined whether they were able to perceive a rhythmic structure in sequences of syllables that alternated in duration, pitch, or intensity. Our findings show that both French- and German-learning infants perceived a rhythmic structure when it was cued by duration or pitch but not intensity. Our findings also show differences in how these infants use duration and pitch cues to group syllable sequences, suggesting that pitch cues were the easier ones to use. Moreover, performance did not differ across languages, failing to reveal early language effects on rhythmic perception. These results contribute to our understanding of the origin of rhythmic perception and perceptual mechanisms shared across music and speech, which may bootstrap language acquisition. KW - language acquisition KW - prosody KW - grouping KW - iambic-trochaic law KW - perceptual biases KW - french-learning infants KW - german-learning infants Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00292 SN - 1662-5161 VL - 10 SP - 6707 EP - 6712 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Bhatara, Anjali A1 - Unger, Annika A1 - Nazzi, Thierry A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Effects of experience with L2 and music on rhythmic grouping by French listeners JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition. KW - rhythmic grouping KW - second language acquisition KW - prosody KW - musicality KW - Iambic KW - Trochaic Law Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728915000425 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 19 SP - 971 EP - 986 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Bhatara, Anjali A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Effects of musicality on the perception of rhythmic structure in speech JF - Laboratory phonology N2 - Language and music share many rhythmic properties, such as variations in intensity and duration leading to repeating patterns. Perception of rhythmic properties may rely on cognitive networks that are shared between the two domains. If so, then variability in speech rhythm perception may relate to individual differences in musicality. To examine this possibility, the present study focuses on rhythmic grouping, which is assumed to be guided by a domain-general principle, the Iambic/Trochaic law, stating that sounds alternating in intensity are grouped as strong-weak, and sounds alternating in duration are grouped as weak-strong. German listeners completed a grouping task: They heard streams of syllables alternating in intensity, duration, or neither, and had to indicate whether they perceived a strong-weak or weak-strong pattern. Moreover, their music perception abilities were measured, and they filled out a questionnaire reporting their productive musical experience. Results showed that better musical rhythm perception - ability was associated with more consistent rhythmic grouping of speech, while melody perception - ability and productive musical experience were not. This suggests shared cognitive procedures in the perception of rhythm in music and speech. Also, the results highlight the relevance of - considering individual differences in musicality when aiming to explain variability in prosody perception. KW - Musical ability KW - rhythm KW - grouping KW - Iambic/Trochaic law KW - speech KW - speech perception KW - musicality KW - prosody KW - domain-general KW - German Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.91 SN - 1868-6346 SN - 1868-6354 VL - 8 IS - 1 PB - Ubiquity Press CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Kager, Rene T1 - Is speech processing influenced by abstract or detailed phonotactic representations? The case of the Obligatory Contour Principle JF - Lingua : international review of general linguistics N2 - Many languages restrict their lexicons by OCP-Place, a phonotactic constraint against co-occurrences of consonants with shared [place] (e.g., McCarthy, 1986). While many previous studies have suggested that listeners have knowledge of OCP-Place and use this for speech processing, it is less clear whether they make reference to an abstract representation of this constraint. In Dutch, OCP-Place gradiently restricts non-adjacent consonant co-occurrences in the lexicon. Focusing on labial-vowel-labial co-occurrences, we found that there are, however, exceptions from the general effect of OCP-Labial: (A) co-occurrences of identical labials are systematically less restricted than co-occurrences of homorganic labials, and (B) some specific pairs (e.g., /pVp/, /bVv/) occur more often than expected. Setting out to study whether exceptions such as (A) and (B) had an effect on processing, the current study presents an artificial language learning experiment and a reanalysis of Boll-Avetisyan and Kager's (2014) speech segmentation data. Results indicate that Dutch listeners can use both knowledge of phonotactic detail and an abstract constraint OCP-Labial as a cue for speech segmentation. We suggest that whether detailed or abstract representations are drawn on depends on the complexity of processing demands. KW - OCP KW - Artificial language learning KW - Speech segmentation KW - Phonotactics KW - Identity KW - Phonotactic probability Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.11.008 SN - 0024-3841 SN - 1872-6135 VL - 171 SP - 74 EP - 91 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bhatara, Anjali A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Agus, Trevor A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Language Experience Affects Grouping of Musical Instrument Sounds JF - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society KW - Cross-linguistic KW - French KW - German KW - Auditory perception KW - Music KW - Rhythmic grouping Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12300 SN - 0364-0213 SN - 1551-6709 VL - 40 SP - 1816 EP - 1830 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Hoboken ER - 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 - Bhatara, Anjali A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Unger, Annika A1 - Nazzi, Thierry A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Native language affects rhythmic grouping of speech JF - The journal of the Acoustical Society of America N2 - Perceptual attunement to one's native language results in language-specific processing of speech sounds. This includes stress cues, instantiated by differences in intensity, pitch, and duration. The present study investigates the effects of linguistic experience on the perception of these cues by studying the Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL), which states that listeners group sounds trochaically (strong-weak) if the sounds vary in loudness or pitch and iambically (weak-strong) if they vary in duration. Participants were native listeners either of French or German; this comparison was chosen because French adults have been shown to be less sensitive than speakers of German and other languages to word-level stress, which is communicated by variation in cues such as intensity, fundamental frequency (F0), or duration. In experiment 1, participants listened to sequences of co-articulated syllables varying in either intensity or duration. The German participants were more consistent in their grouping than the French for both cues. Experiment 2 was identical to experiment 1 except that intensity variation was replaced by pitch variation. German participants again showed more consistency for both cues, and French participants showed especially inconsistent grouping for the pitch-varied sequences. These experiments show that the perception of linguistic rhythm is strongly influenced by linguistic experience. Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4823848 SN - 0001-4966 SN - 1520-8524 VL - 134 IS - 5 SP - 3828 EP - 3843 PB - American Institute of Physics CY - Melville ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Kager, Rene T1 - OCP-Place in speech segmentation JF - Language and speech N2 - OCP-Place, a cross-linguistically well-attested constraint against pairs of consonants with shared [place], is psychologically real. Studies have shown that the processing of words violating OCP-Place is inhibited. Functionalists assume that OCP arises as a consequence of low-level perception: a consonant following another with the same [place] cannot be faithfully perceived as an independent unit. If functionalist theories were correct, then lexical access would be inhibited if two homorganic consonants conjoin at word boundaries-a problem that can only be solved with lexical feedback. Here, we experimentally challenge the functional account by showing that OCP-Place can be used as a speech segmentation cue during pre-lexical processing without lexical feedback, and that the use relates to distributions in the input. In Experiment 1, native listeners of Dutch located word boundaries between two labials when segmenting an artificial language. This indicates a use of OCP-Labial as a segmentation cue, implying a full perception of both labials. Experiment 2 shows that segmentation performance cannot solely be explained by well-formedness intuitions. Experiment 3 shows that knowledge of OCP-Place depends on language-specific input: in Dutch, co-occurrences of labials are under-represented, but co-occurrences of coronals are not. Accordingly, Dutch listeners fail to use OCP-Coronal for segmentation. KW - Artificial language learning KW - OCP-Place KW - phonotactics KW - speech segmentation KW - pre-lexical processing Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830913508074 SN - 0023-8309 SN - 1756-6053 VL - 57 IS - 3 SP - 394 EP - 421 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Bhatara, Anjali A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Processing of rhythm in speech and music in adult dyslexia JF - Brain Sciences N2 - Recent studies have suggested that musical rhythm perception ability can affect the phonological system. The most prevalent causal account for developmental dyslexia is the phonological deficit hypothesis. As rhythm is a subpart of phonology, we hypothesized that reading deficits in dyslexia are associated with rhythm processing in speech and in music. In a rhythmic grouping task, adults with diagnosed dyslexia and age-matched controls listened to speech streams with syllables alternating in intensity, duration, or neither, and indicated whether they perceived a strong-weak or weak-strong rhythm pattern. Additionally, their reading and musical rhythm abilities were measured. Results showed that adults with dyslexia had lower musical rhythm abilities than adults without dyslexia. Moreover, lower musical rhythm ability was associated with lower reading ability in dyslexia. However, speech grouping by adults with dyslexia was not impaired when musical rhythm perception ability was controlled: like adults without dyslexia, they showed consistent preferences. However, rhythmic grouping was predicted by musical rhythm perception ability, irrespective of dyslexia. The results suggest associations among musical rhythm perception ability, speech rhythm perception, and reading ability. This highlights the importance of considering individual variability to better understand dyslexia and raises the possibility that musical rhythm perception ability is a key to phonological and reading acquisition. KW - developmental dyslexia KW - Iambic/Trochaic Law KW - rhythmic grouping KW - musicality KW - speech perception KW - rhythm perception Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10050261 SN - 2076-3425 VL - 10 IS - 5 PB - MDPI CY - Basel ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Fritzsche, Tom A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Hullebus, Marc A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Respect the surroundings BT - effects of phonetic context variability on infants' learning of minimal pairs JF - JASA Express Letters N2 - Fourteen-month-olds' ability to distinguish a just learned word, /bu?k/, from its minimally different word, /du?k/, was assessed under two pre-exposure conditions: one where /b, d/-initial forms occurred in a varying vowel context and another where the vowel was fixed but the final consonant varied. Infants in the experiments benefited from the variable vowel but not from the variable final consonant context, suggesting that vowel variability but not all kinds of variability are beneficial. These results are discussed in the context of time-honored observations on the vowel-dependent nature of place of articulation cues for consonants. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0003574 SN - 2691-1191 VL - 1 IS - 2 PB - AIP Publ. CY - Melville ER -