Pupillary entrainment reveals individual differences in cue weighting in 9-month-old German-learning infants
- 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 segmentingYoung 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.…
Author details: | Mireia Marimon TarterORCiDGND, Barbara HöhleORCiDGND, Alan LangusORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105054 |
ISSN: | 0010-0277 |
ISSN: | 1873-7838 |
Pubmed ID: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35217262 |
Title of parent work (English): | Cognition : international journal of cognitive science |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Place of publishing: | Amsterdam |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2022/07/01 |
Publication year: | 2022 |
Release date: | 2022/11/11 |
Tag: | Cue weighting; Language acquisition; Prosody; Transitional probabilities |
Volume: | 224 |
Article number: | 105054 |
Number of pages: | 15 |
Funding institution: | Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation); [317633480 (SFB 1287)]; European Union [641858, 748909] |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie / 150 Psychologie |
4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache | |
Peer review: | Referiert |