TY - JOUR A1 - Wellmann, Caroline A1 - Holzgrefe-Lang, Julia A1 - Truckenbrodt, Hubert A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - How each prosodic boundary cue matters evidence from German infants JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - 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. KW - infants KW - language acquisition KW - speech perception KW - prosodic bootstrapping KW - prosodic boundary cues KW - cue weighting KW - intonation phrase boundary KW - headturn preference procedure Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00580 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 3 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Kiefer, D. A1 - Cavar, Damir T1 - On the Structure of early syntactic knowledge : continuity and Economy Y1 - 2000 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Watermeyer, Melanie A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Kauschke, Christina T1 - Ausagieren von Sätzen versus Satz-Bild-Zuordnung BT - Vergleich zweier Methoden zur Untersuchung des Sprachverständnisses anhand von semantisch reversiblen Sätzen mit Objektvoranstellung bei drei- und fünfjährigen Kindern JF - Spektrum Patholinguistik Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-54374 SN - 1869-3822 SN - 1866-9433 IS - 4 SP - 237 EP - 246 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Watermeyer, Melanie A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Kauschke, Christina T1 - Ausagieren von Sätzen versus Satz-Bild-Zuordnung: Vergleich zweier Methoden zur Untersuchung des Sprachverständnisses anhand von semantisch reversiblen Sätzen mit Objektvoranstellung bei drei- und fünfjährigen Kindern Y1 - 2011 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 - van Kampen, Anja A1 - Parmaksiz, Güliz A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Metrical and statistical cues for word segmentation : the use of vowel harmony and word stress as a cue to word boundaries by 6- and 9-month-old Turkish learners Y1 - 2008 SN - 978-1-8471-8618-8 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Ott, Susan T1 - On the distribution of dorsals in complex and simple onsets in child German, Dutch and English Y1 - 2009 SN - 978-3-11-021931-9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Tamasi, Katalin A1 - Mckean, Cristina A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Children's gradient sensitivity to phonological mismatch BT - Considering the dynamics of looking behavior and pupil dilation JF - Journal of child language N2 - In a preferential looking paradigm, we studied how children's looking behavior and pupillary response were modulated by the degree of phonological mismatch between the correct label of a target referent and its manipulated form. We manipulated degree of mismatch by introducing one or more featural changes to the target label. Both looking behavior and pupillary response were sensitive to degree of mismatch, corroborating previous studies that found differential responses in one or the other measure. Using time-course analyses, we present for the first time results demonstrating full separability among conditions (detecting difference not only between one vs. more, but also between two and three featural changes). Furthermore, the correct labels and small featural changes were associated with stable target preference, while large featural changes were associated with oscillating looking behavior, suggesting significant shifts in looking preference over time. These findings further support and extend the notion that early words are represented in great detail, containing subphonemic information. KW - lexical development KW - featural distance KW - mispronunciation detection KW - eye-tracking KW - pupillometry Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000259 SN - 0305-0009 SN - 1469-7602 VL - 46 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 23 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Szendrői, Kriszta A1 - Schumacher, Rebecca A1 - Fritzsche, Tom A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Acquisition of quantifier raising of a universal across an existential BT - Evidence from German JF - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics N2 - Our paper reports an act out task with German 5- and 6-year olds and adults involving doubly-quantified sentences with a universal object and an existential subject. We found that 5- and 6-year olds allow inverse scope in such sentences, while adults do not. Our findings contribute to a growing body of research (e.g. Gualmini et al. 2008; Musolino 2009, etc.) showing that children are more flexible in their scopal considerations than initially proposed by the Isomorphism proposal (Lidz & Musolino 2002; Musolino & Lidz 2006). This result provides support for a theory of German, a “no quantifier raising”-language, in terms of soft violable constraints, or global economy terms (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 2012), rather than in terms of hard inviolable constraints or rules (Frey 1993). Finally, the results are compatible with Reinhart’s (2004) hypothesis that children do not perform global interface economy considerations due to the increased processing associated with it. KW - quantifier raising KW - language development KW - inverse scope reading KW - German language KW - interface economy Y1 - 2017 SN - 2397-1835 VL - 2 PB - Open Library of Humanities CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Szendroi, Kriszta A1 - Bernard, Carline A1 - Berger, Frauke A1 - Gervain, Judit A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds JF - Journal of child language N2 - Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of subject and object focus. Our findings thus support the view that production does not precede comprehension in the acquisition of focus. We tested participants speaking English, German, and French. All three languages allow prosodic subject and object focus marking, but use additional syntactic marking to varying degrees (English: dispreferred; German: possible; French preferred). French participants produced fewer subject marked responses than English participants. We found no other cross-linguistic differences. Participants interpreted prosodic focus marking similarly and in an adult-like fashion in all three languages. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000917000071 SN - 0305-0009 SN - 1469-7602 VL - 45 IS - 1 SP - 219 EP - 241 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schröder, C. A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Prosodic perception during early language acquisition JF - Sprache, Stimme, Gehör : Zeitschrift für Kommunikationsstörungen N2 - Prosody plays an important role in early language acquisition that in most children proceeds rapidly and easily. From birth on infants are able to perceive prosodic information in the speech signal. During the course of the first year of life prosodic perception abilities continue to develop. Cross-linguistic studies have shown that this development is already influenced by the native language. As prosodic and syntactic units occur often in correlation, prosodic cues in the continuous speech signal might help infants to derive information on how to segment their native language into syntactically relevant units. Indeed, infants use their prosodic perception and are able to detect word, phrase and clause boundaries using prosodic cues from the speech signal. Thus, during the first year of life when perceiving speech the processing of prosodic cues is focussed and allows for an efficient access to language acquisition. Future studies need to determine whether early prosodic perception abilities can provide markers for later language development and predict language impairment. KW - prosodic processing KW - early speech perception KW - segmentation KW - prosodic cues KW - prosody-syntax interface Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0031-1284404 SN - 0342-0477 VL - 35 IS - 3 SP - E91 EP - E98 PB - Thieme CY - Stuttgart ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schmitz, Michaela A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Müller, Anja A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-Learning Infants from 4 to 14 Months Y1 - 2006 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schmitz, Michaela A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Müller, Anja A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-learning infants from 4 to 14 months N2 - 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. KW - prosodic focus KW - HTP KW - infants Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19566 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schmitz, M. A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Habituierung und Dishabituierung als Maße der perzeptuellen und kognitiven Entwicklung : Methoden und Anwendungsbereiche Y1 - 2007 SN - 978-3-8017-1898-5 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ren, Jie A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - The interplay between language acquisition and cognitive development JF - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal KW - Language Acquisition KW - Cognitive Development KW - Infancy KW - Cross-domain KW - Development Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101718 SN - 0163-6383 SN - 1879-0453 SN - 1934-8800 VL - 67 PB - Elsevier Science CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Petrone, Caterina A1 - Truckenbrodt, Hubert A1 - Wellmann, Caroline A1 - Holzgrefe-Lang, Julia A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Prosodic boundary cues in German BT - evidence from the production and perception of bracketed lists JF - Journal of phonetics N2 - This study investigates prosodic phrasing of bracketed lists in German. We analyze variation in pauses, phrase-final lengthening and f0 in speech production and how these cues affect boundary perception. In line with the literature, it was found that pauses are often used to signal intonation phrase boundaries, while final lengthening and f0 are employed across different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Deviations from expectations based on the standard syntax-prosody mapping are interpreted in terms of task-specific effects. That is, we argue that speakers add/delete prosodic boundaries to enhance the phonological contrast between different bracketings in the experimental task. In perception, three experiments were run, in which we tested only single cues (but temporally distributed at different locations of the sentences). Results from identification tasks and reaction time measurements indicate that pauses lead to a more abrupt shift in listeners׳ prosodic judgments, while f0 and final lengthening are exploited in a more gradient manner. Hence, pauses, final lengthening and f0 have an impact on boundary perception, though listeners show different sensitivity to the three acoustic cues. KW - Prosodic boundary KW - Phrase-final lengthening KW - Pause KW - f0 peaks KW - Production KW - Perception KW - German Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2017.01.002 SN - 0095-4470 VL - 61 SP - 71 EP - 92 PB - Elsevier CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Penner, Zvi A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Extremely early knowledge of language specific word-order Y1 - 2000 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pelzer, Lydia A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Processing of morphological markers as a cue to syntactic phrases by 10-month-olds German-learning infants Y1 - 2006 SN - 1847180280 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pelzer, Lydia A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - The impact of morphological markers on infants' and adults' speech processing Y1 - 2006 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ott, Susan A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - The effect of phonotactic constraints in German-speaking children with delayed phonological acquisition : Evidence from production of word-initial consonant clusters Y1 - 2006 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Omane, Paul Okyere A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Acquiring syntactic variability BT - The production of Wh-questions in children and adults speaking Akan JF - Frontiers in communication N2 - This paper investigates the predictions of the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis by studying the acquisition of wh-questions in 4- and 5-year-old Akan-speaking children in an experimental approach using an elicited production and an elicited imitation task. Akan has two types of wh-question structures (wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions), which allows an investigation of children’s acquisition of these two question structures and their preferences for one or the other. Our results show that adults prefer to use wh-ex-situ questions over wh-in-situ questions. The results from the children show that both age groups have the two question structures in their linguistic repertoire. However, they differ in their preferences in usage in the elicited production task: while the 5-year-olds preferred the wh-in-situ structure over the wh-ex-situ structure, the 4-year-olds showed a selective preference for the wh-in-situ structure in who-questions. These findings suggest a developmental change in wh-question preferences in Akan-learning children between 4 and 5 years of age with a so far unobserved u-shaped developmental pattern. In the elicited imitation task, all groups showed a strong tendency to maintain the structure of in-situ and ex-situ questions in repeating grammatical questions. When repairing ungrammatical ex-situ questions, structural changes to grammatical in-situ questions were hardly observed but the insertion of missing morphemes while keeping the ex-situ structure. Together, our findings provide only partial support for the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis. KW - Akan KW - wh-questions KW - wh-in-situ KW - wh-ex-situ KW - derivational complexity KW - language acquisition Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.604951 SN - 2297-900X VL - 2021 PB - Frontiers Media CY - Lausanne, Schweiz ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Nubel, K. A1 - Kruck, S. A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Suhl, U. A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen A1 - Gross, M. T1 - Interaktion behavioraler und elektrophysiologischer Ergebnisse zur Phonemdiskrimination bei Säuglingen Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Müller, Anja A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Teaching a new word : properties of CDS to 12-month-old German-learning children Y1 - 2008 SN - 978-1-8471-8532-7 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Müller, Anja A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schmitz, Michaela A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Information structural constraints on children's early language production : the acquisition of the focus particle "auch" (also) in German learning 12-to 36-month-olds Y1 - 2009 UR - http://fla.sagepub.com/ SN - 0142-7237 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Müller, A. A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schmitz, M. A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Focus-to-stress alignment in 4- to 5-year-old German-learning children Y1 - 2006 SN - 1847180280 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Marimon Tarter, Mireia A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Langus, Alan T1 - Pupillary entrainment reveals individual differences in cue weighting in 9-month-old German-learning infants JF - Cognition : international journal of cognitive science N2 - Young infants can segment continuous speech with statistical as well as prosodic cues. Understanding how these cues interact can be informative about how infants solve the segmentation problem. Here we investigate how German-speaking adults and 9-month-old German-learning infants weigh statistical and prosodic cues when segmenting continuous speech. We measured participants' pupil size while they were familiarized with a continuous speech stream where prosodic cues were pitted off against transitional probabilities. Adult participants' changes in pupil size synchronized with the occurrence of prosodic words during the familiarization and the temporal alignment of these pupillary changes was predictive of adult participants' performance at test. Further, 9-month-olds as a group failed to consistently segment the familiarization stream with prosodic or statistical cues. However, the variability in temporal alignment of the pupillary changes at word frequency showed that prosodic and statistical cues compete for dominance when segmenting continuous speech. A followup language development questionnaire at 40 months of age suggested that infants who entrained to prosodic words performed better on a vocabulary task and those infants who relied more on statistical cues performed better on grammatical tasks. Together these results suggest that statistics and prosody may serve different roles in speech segmentation in infancy. KW - Language acquisition KW - Transitional probabilities KW - Prosody KW - Cue weighting Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105054 SN - 0010-0277 SN - 1873-7838 VL - 224 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Langus, Alan A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Object individuation and labelling in 6-month-old infants JF - Infant behavior & development N2 - The ability to determine how many objects are involved in physical events is fundamental for reasoning about the world that surrounds us. Previous studies suggest that infants can fail to individuate objects in ambiguous occlusion events until their first birthday and that learning words for the objects may play a crucial role in the development of this ability. The present eye-tracking study tested whether the classical object individuation experiments underestimate young infants’ ability to individuate objects and the role word learning plays in this process. Three groups of 6-month-old infants (N = 72) saw two opaque boxes side by side on the eye-tracker screen so that the content of the boxes was not visible. During a familiarization phase, two visually identical objects emerged sequentially from one box and two visually different objects from the other box. For one group of infants the familiarization was silent (Visual Only condition). For a second group of infants the objects were accompanied with nonsense words so that objects’ shape and linguistic labels indicated the same number of objects in the two boxes (Visual & Language condition). For the third group of infants, objects’ shape and linguistic labels were in conflict (Visual vs. Language condition). Following the familiarization, it was revealed that both boxes contained the same number of objects (e.g. one or two). In the Visual Only condition, infants looked longer to the box with incorrect number of objects at test, showing that they could individuate objects using visual cues alone. In the Visual & Language condition infants showed the same looking pattern. However, in the Visual vs Language condition infants looked longer to the box with incorrect number of objects according to linguistic labels. The results show that infants can individuate objects in a complex object individuation paradigm considerably earlier than previously thought and that linguistic cues enforce their own preference in object individuation. The results are consistent with the idea that when language and visual information are in conflict, language can exert an influence on how young infants reason about the visual world. KW - Object individuation KW - Object labelling KW - Cognitive development KW - Language KW - development Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101627 SN - 0163-6383 SN - 1879-0453 VL - 65 PB - Elsevier CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krasotkina, Anna A1 - Götz, Antonia A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schwarzer, Gudrun T1 - Perceptual narrowing in face- and speech-perception domains in infancy BT - a longitudinal approach JF - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal N2 - During the first year of life, infants undergo a process known as perceptual narrowing, which reduces their sensitivity to classes of stimuli which the infants do not encounter in their environment. It has been proposed that perceptual narrowing for faces and speech may be driven by shared domain-general processes. To investigate this theory, our study longitudinally tested 50 German Caucasian infants with respect to these domains first at 6 months of age followed by a second testing at 9 months of age. We used an infant-controlled habituation-dishabituation paradigm to test the infants' ability to discriminate among other-race Asian faces and non-native Cantonese speech tones, as well as same-race Caucasian faces as a control. We found that while at 6 months of age infants could discriminate among all stimuli, by 9 months of age they could no longer discriminate among other-race faces or non-native tones. However, infants could discriminate among same-race stimuli both at 6 and at 9 months of age. These results demonstrate that the same infants undergo perceptual narrowing for both other-race faces and non-native speech tones between the ages of 6 and 9 months. This parallel development of perceptual narrowing occurring in both the face and speech perception modalities over the same period of time lends support to the domain-general theory of perceptual narrowing in face and speech perception. KW - face perception KW - speech perception KW - longitudinal KW - infant KW - perceptual KW - narrowing Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101607 SN - 0163-6383 SN - 1879-0453 VL - 64 PB - Elsevier CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krasotkina, Anna A1 - Götz, Antonia A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schwarzer, Gudrun T1 - Infants’ gaze patterns for same-race and other-race faces, and the other-race effect JF - Brain Sciences N2 - The other-race effect (ORE) can be described as difficulties in discriminating between faces of ethnicities other than one's own, and can already be observed at approximately 9 months of age. Recent studies also showed that infants visually explore same-and other-race faces differently. However, it is still unclear whether infants' looking behavior for same- and other-race faces is related to their face discrimination abilities. To investigate this question we conducted a habituation-dishabituation experiment to examine Caucasian 9-month-old infants' gaze behavior, and their discrimination of same- and other-race faces, using eye-tracking measurements. We found that infants looked longer at the eyes of same-race faces over the course of habituation, as compared to other-race faces. After habituation, infants demonstrated a clear other-race effect by successfully discriminating between same-race faces, but not other-race faces. Importantly, the infants' ability to discriminate between same-race faces significantly correlated with their fixation time towards the eyes of same-race faces during habituation. Thus, our findings suggest that for infants old enough to begin exhibiting the ORE, gaze behavior during habituation is related to their ability to differentiate among same-race faces, compared to other-race faces. KW - eye-tracking KW - infancy KW - habituation KW - other-race effect KW - face KW - discrimination Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10060331 SN - 2076-3425 VL - 10 IS - 6 PB - Brain Sciences CY - Basel 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 - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - German-learning infants' ability to detect unstressed closed-class elements in continuous speech Y1 - 2003 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Sensitivity to closed-class-elements in preverbal children Y1 - 1998 SN - 1- 574-73032-0 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Lauter Laute? : Lautsegmente und Silben in der Sprachperzeption und im Spracherwerb Y1 - 2000 SN - 3-484-73053-6 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - The origins of syntactic knowledge : recognition of determiners in one old German children Y1 - 2000 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Discovering Grammar : prosodic and morpho-syntactic aspects of rule formation in first language acquisition Y1 - 1999 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Wang, Hao T1 - Syntactic categorization of new words : distributional and morphological cues to form class Y1 - 2008 UR - http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713659663~db=all SN - 0020-7594 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben A1 - Weisenborn, J. T1 - Word processing at 19 months at its relation to language performance at 30 months : a retrospective analysis of data from German learning children Y1 - 2006 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben A1 - Bartels, Sonja A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Phonological specificity of early lexical representations in German 19-month-olds at risk for SLI Y1 - 2006 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Schmitz, M. A1 - Santelmann, L. M. A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - The recognition of discontinuous verbal dependencies by German 19-month-olds : evidence for lexical and structural influences on childrens early processing capacities Y1 - 2006 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Kiefer, D. A1 - Schulz, A. A1 - Weissenborn, E. A1 - Schmitz, M. T1 - Functional elements in infants' speech processing : the role of determiners in syntactic categorization of lexical elements N2 - How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head-turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12- to 13-month-olds cannot do this, 14- to 16- month-olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child- directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co-occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable Cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word-to-world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Hoernig, Robin A1 - Weskott, Thomas A1 - Knauf, Selene A1 - Krueger, Agnes T1 - Effects of focus and definiteness on children's word order: evidence from German five-year-olds' reproductions of double object constructions JF - Journal of child language N2 - Two experiments tested how faithfully German children aged 4; 5 to 5; 6 reproduce ditransitive sentences that are unmarked or marked with respect to word order and focus (Exp1) or definiteness (Exp2). Adopting an optimality theory (OT) approach, it is assumed that in the German adult grammar word order is ranked lower than focus and definiteness. Faithfulness of children's reproductions decreased as markedness of inputs increased; unmarked structures were reproduced most faithfully and unfaithful outputs had most often an unmarked form. Consistent with the OT proposal, children were more tolerant against inputs marked for word order than for focus; in conflict with the proposal, children were less tolerant against inputs marked for word order than for definiteness. Our results suggest that the linearization of objects in German double object constructions is affected by focus and definiteness, but that prosodic principles may have an impact on the position of a focused constituent. Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000913000196 SN - 0305-0009 SN - 1469-7602 VL - 41 IS - 4 SP - 780 EP - 810 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Fritzsche, Tom A1 - Meß, Katharina A1 - Philipp, Mareike A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. T1 - Only the right noise? BT - Effects of phonetic and visual input variability on 14-month-olds' minimal pair word learning JF - Developmental Science N2 - Seminal work by Werker and colleagues (Stager & Werker [1997]Nature, 388, 381-382) has found that 14-month-old infants do not show evidence for learning minimal pairs in the habituation-switch paradigm. However, when multiple speakers produce the minimal pair in acoustically variable ways, infants' performance improves in comparison to a single speaker condition (Rost & McMurray [2009]Developmental Science, 12, 339-349). The current study further extends these results and assesses how different kinds of input variability affect 14-month-olds' minimal pair learning in the habituation-switch paradigm testing German learning infants. The first two experiments investigated word learning when the labels were spoken by a single speaker versus when the labels were spoken by multiple speakers. In the third experiment we studied whether non-acoustic variability, implemented by visual variability of the objects presented together with the labels, would also affect minimal pair learning. We found enhanced learning in the multiple speakers compared to the single speaker condition, confirming previous findings with English-learning infants. In contrast, visual variability of the presented objects did not support learning. These findings both confirm and better delimit the beneficial role of speech-specific variability in minimal pair learning. Finally, we review different proposals on the mechanisms via which variability confers benefits to learning and outline what may be likely principles that underlie this benefit. We highlight among these the multiplicity of acoustic cues signalling phonemic contrasts and the presence of relations among these cues. It is in these relations where we trace part of the source for the apparent paradoxical benefit of variability in learning. KW - acoustic variability KW - habituation-switch paradigm KW - infant word learning KW - minimal pairs KW - phonological development KW - visual variability Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12950 SN - 1363-755X SN - 1467-7687 VL - 23 IS - 5 SP - 1 EP - 16 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Oxford 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 - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Variability and stability in early language acquisition BT - comparing recognition and bilingual infants' speech perception and word recognition JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - Many human infants grow up learning more than one language simultaneously but only recently has research started to study early language acquisition in this population more systematically. The paper gives an overview on findings on early language acquisition in bilingual infants during the first two years of life and compares these findings to current knowledge on early language acquisition in monolingual infants. Given the state of the research, the overview focuses on research on phonological and early lexical development in the first two years of life. We will show that the developmental trajectory of early language acquisition in these areas is very similar in mono- and bilingual infants suggesting that these early steps into language are guided by mechanisms that are rather robust against the differences in the conditions of language exposure that mono- and bilingual infants typically experience. KW - language acquisition KW - bilingual infants KW - bilingual phonological KW - development KW - bilingual lexical development KW - simultaneous bilingualism Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000348 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 23 IS - 1 SP - 56 EP - 71 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Herold, Birgit A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Language specific prosodic preferences during the first year of life : evidence from German and French infants Y1 - 2009 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01636383 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2009.03.004 SN - 0163-6383 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Berger, Frauke A1 - Sauermann, Antje T1 - Information structure in first language acquisition JF - The Oxford handbook of information structure Y1 - 2016 SN - 978-0-19-964267-0 SP - 562 EP - 580 PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Berger, Frauke A1 - Müller, Anja A1 - Schmitz, Michaela A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - Focus particles in children's language : production and comprehension of auch "also" in German learners from 1 year to 4 years of age Y1 - 2009 UR - http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t775653668~db=all U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/10489220802584550 SN - 1048-9223 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Sprachwahrnehmung und Spracherwerb im ersten Lebensjahr Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Der Einstieg in die Grammatik : Spracherwerb während des ersten Lebensjahres Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Sprachwahrnehmung und Spracherwerb im ersten Lebensjahr Y1 - 2004 ER -