The proposed studies will examine how prosodic marking of the given/new distinction interacts with lexical stress to facilitate or impede infants use of speech rhythm in identifying words. Languages vary in how these different influences on prosody interact; therefore, to begin to get a handle on the cross-linguistic generality of early language processing it is important to examine whether certain prosodic cues (e.g., given vs. new stress) are consistent across languages, and whether these cues interact with prosody that is language specific (e.g., word-initial vs. non-word-initial lexical stress). Four studies are proposed: 1) an acoustic analysis of the given/new stress present in English and Spanish infant-directed speech, 2) an extension of work (Morgan, 1996b) examining predominantly English-exposed infants segmentation biases, however examining these biases in predominantly Spanish-exposed infants, and 3/4) perceptual studies of the influence of naturally produced given/new and lexical stress on English- and Spanish-exposed infants speech segmentation abilities. The specific methodologies relevant to these perceptual studies are a word monitoring procedure and a noise-detection method introduced by Morgan (1996a) that are based on the conditioned head turning method traditionally used to study infant speech perception.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F32)
Project #
5F32HD008394-02
Application #
2857399
Study Section
Human Development and Aging Subcommittee 3 (HUD)
Program Officer
Mccardle, Peggy D
Project Start
1998-12-18
Project End
Budget Start
1998-12-18
Budget End
1999-12-17
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
1999
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Brown University
Department
Miscellaneous
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
001785542
City
Providence
State
RI
Country
United States
Zip Code
02912
Baart, Martijn; Vroomen, Jean; Shaw, Kathleen et al. (2014) Degrading phonetic information affects matching of audiovisual speech in adults, but not in infants. Cognition 130:31-43
Bortfeld, Heather; Morgan, James L (2010) Is early word-form processing stress-full? How natural variability supports recognition. Cogn Psychol 60:241-66
Bortfeld, Heather; Fava, Eswen; Boas, David A (2009) Identifying cortical lateralization of speech processing in infants using near-infrared spectroscopy. Dev Neuropsychol 34:52-65
Felps, Daniel; Bortfeld, Heather; Gutierrez-Osuna, Ricardo (2009) Foreign accent conversion in computer assisted pronunciation training. Speech Commun 51:920-932
Singh, Leher; Nestor, Sarah S; Bortfeld, Heather (2008) Overcoming the Effects of Variation in Infant Speech Segmentation: Influences of Word Familiarity. Infancy 13:57-74