Development of categorical speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children and adolescents

Although children develop categorical speech perception at a very young age, the maturation process remains unclear. A cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 4-, 6-, and 10-year-old children, 14-year-old adolescents, and adults (n = 104, 56 males, all Asians from mainland China) was conducted to investigate the development of categorical perception of four Mandarin phonemic contrasts: lexical tone contrast Tone 1-2, vowel contrast /u/−/i/, consonant aspiration contrast /p/−/p^h/, and consonant formant transition contrast /p/−/t/. The results indicated that different types of phonemic contrasts, and even the identification and discrimination of the same phonemic contrast, matured asynchronously. The observation that tone and vowel perception are achieved earlier than consonant perception supports the phonological saliency hypothesis.     

The Role of Auditory and Visual Speech in Word Learning at 18 Months and in Adulthood

Visual information influences speech perception in both infants and adults. It is still unknown whether lexical representations are multisensory. To address this question, we exposed 18‐month‐old infants (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) to new word–object pairings: Participants either heard the acoustic form of the words or saw the talking face in silence. They were then tested on recognition in the same or the other modality. Both 18‐month‐old infants and adults learned the lexical mappings when the words were presented auditorily and recognized the mapping at test when the word was presented in either modality, but only adults learned new words in a visual‐only presentation. These results suggest developmental changes in the sensory format of lexical representations.     

From Flexibility to Constraint: The Contrastive Use of Lexical Tone in Early Word Learning

Infants must develop both flexibility and constraint in their interpretation of acceptable word forms. The current experiments examined the development of infants' lexical interpretation of non‐native variations in pitch contour. Fourteen‐, 17‐, and 19‐month‐olds (Experiments 1 and 2, N = 72) heard labels for two novel objects; labels contained the same syllable produced with distinct pitch contours (Mandarin lexical tones). The youngest infants learned the label–object mappings, but the older groups did not, despite being able to discriminate pitch differences in an object‐free task (Experiment 3, N = 14). Results indicate that 14‐month‐olds remain flexible regarding what sounds make meaningful distinctions between words. By 17–19 months, experience with a nontonal native language constrains infants' interpretation of lexical tone.     

12-month-olds' phonotactic knowledge guides their word-object mappings

This study examined whether 12‐month‐olds will accept words that differ phonologically and phonetically from their native language as object labels in an associative learning task. Sixty infants were presented with sets of English word–object (N = 30), Japanese word–object (N = 15), or Czech word–object (N = 15) pairings until they habituated. Infants associated CVCV English, CCVC English, and CVCV Japanese words, but not CCVC Czech words, with novel objects. These results demonstrate that by 12 months of age, infants are beginning to apply their language‐specific knowledge to their acceptance of word forms. That is, they will not map words that violate the phonotactics of their native language to objects.     

论现代汉语中上声在轻声前的变调

语流音变是一种普遍存在而又特殊的语音现象，现代汉语中的语流音变现象多种多样，其中上声的变调比较复杂，也很有趣，本文拟从上声字在轻声前复杂的变调现象入手，探讨上声字后轻声字的来源，并试图从语音的发音原理和发音过程，语义和语用等方面对上声字在轻声字前的变调原因作出解释。     

从《道德经》的语言模糊现象分析译者的翻译策略

语言模糊现象主要包括语音模糊、词义模糊和句法模糊三个方面。语言模糊现象是《道德经》翻译的特征之一,从语音模糊、词义模糊和句法模糊三个角度分析不同译者翻译《道德经》的模糊语言时采用的翻译策略,具体体现在通假字的使用、一词多义和句法模糊上。     

福清方言的语流音变

本文介绍了福建省福清市地方方言的音、韵、调的基本情况,使人们对当地的音、韵、调有个初步的印象,并指出这些音、韵的概括是建立在古人研究、归纳的基础上的。本文从本地方方言的实际出发,运用人民群众生产、生活中翔实的语言材料,客观地描述了当地方言中存在的语流音变现象,其中有传统的词汇,也有现代的词汇;有歌谣,有熟语,也有生活中的口语。文中还充分提供了对照的语汇,对产生语流音变的语汇进行标识,使人们能够辨析出其中差异之处。     

Postural and Object‐Oriented Experiences Advance Early Reaching,Object Exploration,and Means–End Behavior

The effects of 3 weeks of social (control), postural, or object‐oriented experiences on 9‐ to 21‐week‐old infants’ (N = 42) reaching, exploration, and means–end behaviors were assessed. Coders recorded object contacts, mouthing, fingering, attention, and affect from video. Postural and object‐oriented experiences advanced reaching, haptic exploration of objects, and developing means–end behavior compared to social experience. Object‐oriented experience best‐advanced means–end behavior. The results suggest that the development of novel behaviors is dependent on multiple subsystems and can be similarly advanced by addressing a variety of these subsystems. They also suggest that past experiences with active object exploration can facilitate early information processing and the development of early knowledge.     

Lexical prosody as an aspect of oral reading fluency

The purpose of the study was to determine whether the lexical compounding, suffixation, and part of speech aspects of lexical prosody rendered while reading text aloud are predictive of children’s developing oral reading fluency and reading comprehension skills. Ninety-four third grade children were recorded while reading aloud a grade-level passage targeting lexical prosody contrasts related to suffixation, compounding, and part of speech. Children also completed assessments on reading fluency, word reading efficiency, and reading comprehension skills. Prosodic measurements of pitch and amplitude for each syllable of the targeted words, and spoken head word length in ms for targeted compound words, were carried out. Spectrographic analyses indicated that children generally displayed appropriate prosody for each lexical prosody contrast examined. The extent to which children made these prosodic distinctions between syllables was related to their reading fluency and comprehension skills. The study finds that, in the oral reading of connected texts, children’s use of lexical prosody is an aspect of general reading prosody that is predictive of reading fluency.     

Preference effects on acquisition and retention of concurrent discriminations by rhesus monkeys

Ten rhesus monkeys were trained on five tasks, each of which consisted of eight concurrently presented object discrimination problems. Sequences of presentation were devised to allow one, two, or three new tasks to intervene between acquisition and retention tests or to provide a 30-day period of no testing. Equivalent and proficient performances were obtained in all retention tests, and no relationship was observed between retention and the initial preference characteristics of various objects. Object pReferences did produce significant influences upon acquisition, but these effects were not as pronounced in early tasks as in later ones. An additional retention test provided support for the contention that monkeys do not necessarily process information about specific object pair discriminations. Rather, they appeared to retain a list of previously rewarded objects even when object pairings were different from those provided during acquisition. Concurrent discriminations involving many distinct objects were resistant to interference and independent of preference characteristics over long retention periods.     

Stress sensitivity and reading performance in Spanish: A study with children

This paper investigates the relationship between ability to detect changes in prosody and reading performance in Spanish. Participants were children aged 7–8 years. Their tasks consisted of reading words, reading non‐words, stressing non‐words and reproducing sequences of two, three or four non‐words by pressing the corresponding keys on the computer keyboard. Non‐word sequences were constructed with minimal non‐word pairs differing in a single phoneme (/kúpi/ ‐ /kúti/) or in the stress pattern (/mípa/ ‐ /mipá/). Results showed that performance on phoneme contrast sequences (e.g. /kúpi/ ‐ /kúti/) predicted word reading. In contrast, performance on stress contrast sequences (e.g. /mípa/ ‐ /mipá/) predicted non‐word reading, but only when two‐non‐word sequences were analysed. This suggests that stress sensitivity may be one of the factors related to reading fluency as most errors at reading non‐words consisted of false starts and pauses between syllables. Results also showed that stress sensitivity (scored in two non‐word sequences) predicted stress assignment, and that knowledge of stress rules predicted both word and non‐word reading. This suggests that stress sensitivity may help in learning stress rules, and that knowledge of stress rules is relevant for reading.     

Phonological and morphological processing in adult students with learning/reading disabilities

A target group of college students with learning/reading disabilities was compared with reading-level (RA) and chronological-age (CA) contrast groups on several phonological and morphological computerized information-processing tasks. Results confirm the importance of accurate and rapid processing of simple lexical items to the automatic level. The target students were less accurate and took longer reaction time, as compared with their CA controls, though not with the RA contrast group, in deciding if pseudohomophonics sounded like real words and if pairs of words with different rime conditions rhymed. The target students showed both quantitative and qualitative differences in processing morphological words and morphographic letter strings, in contrast to some earlier findings. The integration of phonological and morphological knowledge is emphasized in working with adult college students with learning/reading disabilities.     

Contrastive Analysis of Intonation and Tone in Chinese and English

In English,intonation is the main research object of supra-segmental phonology,it refers to the changes of tone and pitch.English intonation is non-tone language which means the word meaning will not changed with the changing of the independent word's tone,while Chinese is Tone language,in which tone often determinates the meaning of word,different tones are representative of different meanings.Chinese language function exerts differently in tone and intonation,and it is a bit complicated compared with English.     

Bilingual Infants Demonstrate Advantages in Learning Words in a Third Language

Prior research suggests that bilingualism may endow infants with greater phonological flexibility. This study investigated whether this flexibility facilitates word learning in additional languages (n = 96). Experiment 1 compared 18‐ to 20‐month‐old monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Mandarin) infants on their ability to learn words distinguished by click consonants from a Southern African language, Ndebele. English–Mandarin bilingual infants were sensitive to Ndebele click contrasts, but monolingual English infants were not. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we investigated whether enhanced bilingual sensitivity extended to analogous nonlinguistic labels: hand claps and finger snaps. Although discriminated by infants, neither group distinguished words labeled by hand claps and finger snaps. Results suggest that bilingual infants' sustained openness to non native contrast may facilitate the uptake of words in distant languages.     

苏教版小学语文教材拼音标注问题探讨

苏教版小学语文教材在课文及词语的拼音标注上存在一些问题,如拼写没有以词为书写单位,句子开头的字母和人名、地名的开头字母均没有大写,在声调的标注上有的用变调、有的用原调,儿尾词语及“啊”的变读也不尽准确等.     

Flexible use of lexical and sublexical information in word recognition

Within the dual‐route framework it is hypothesised that readers exhibit flexibility in their use of lexical and non‐lexical information in word naming. In the present study, participants named high‐ and low‐frequency regular one‐syllable English words embedded within lists of regular or irregular one‐ or two‐syllable English words. A large number of irregular words should bias the reader toward the lexical route, whereas a list consisting exclusively of regular words should allow more efficient use of sublexical information present in the word. Word frequency effects were obtained when the list was dominated by either regular or irregular two‐syllable filler words. Furthermore, there was an interaction between frequency and regularity for the one‐syllable words, indicating that the frequency effect was significantly larger when the fillers were one‐syllable irregular words relative to one‐syllable regular words. These results extend those reported for a shallow orthography, and indicate strategic control over the use of phonological and lexical information in English word recognition.     

Take Your Word or Tone for It? European American and Chinese Children’s Attention to Emotional Cues in Speech

Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children’s attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120 Chinese children (4–9 years old). Each child played two computer games in which they listened to spoken words and judged the pleasantness of either the word meaning (Word game) or the vocal tone (Tone game) while ignoring the other aspect. Chinese children paid more spontaneous attention to vocal tones and less to word meanings than did EA children. These findings shed critical light on the role of culture in shaping affective cognitive processes during development.     

The role of feedback from phonology to orthography in orthographic learning: an extension of item‐based accounts

Skilled readers were trained to recognise either the oral (n=44) or visual form (n=40) of a set of 32 novel words (oral and visual instantiation, respectively). Training involved learning the ‘meanings’ for the instantiated words and was followed by a visual lexical decision task in which the instantiated words were mixed with real English words and untrained pseudowords, and the instantiated words were to be considered as words. The phonology‐to‐orthography consistency (feedback consistency) of the instantiated words was manipulated to investigate the role of feedback from phonology in orthographic learning. Masked consonant and vowel‐preserving form primes were used in the lexical decision task as probes of orthographic learning. Feedback‐consistent instantiated words were recognised significantly faster in lexical decision than feedback‐inconsistent instantiated words, and facilitation was significantly greater from consonant‐preserving than vowel‐preserving primes for orally but not visually instantiated words. The results support the hypothesis that orthographic representations based on a consonant frame can be generated from the speech signal before encountering the printed forms, and that feedback from phonology is involved in the early stages of orthographic learning.     

略谈词语的搭桥现象

在训诂研究中,词语的搭桥现象是指没有同义关系的词语之间基于一个多义词或音变同源词构成了训释关系或同源系列。词语搭桥现象存在于词义训释和同源系联中。在词义训释中,被释词因与释词的一个义位相同而得以训释另一个义位,这归因于古人不同的字观念。在同源系联中,不同的词由于源于一词的不同义位而构成同源系列,各词有不同的语源义特征。确认同源系联中的搭桥现象需要辨别相关义位是否源自一词,排除同形词、字的双本义和假借用法形成的搭桥假象。词义训释和同源系联在搭桥现象上存在一些不同。     

Semantic effects on word naming in children with developmental dyslexia

Repetition priming was used to examine whether children with dyslexia bias a lexical–semantic pathway when reading words aloud. For the dyslexic group (n = 18, age 9.4–11.8 years), but not for age‐matched controls (n = 18, age 9.2–12.4 years), reaction times when naming pictures were faster after naming the corresponding word. A reading age‐matched control group (n = 24, age 6.8–8.9 years) showed similar priming effects to the children with dyslexia. The magnitude of repetition priming was greater for children with dyslexia with poor nonword reading and slower picture naming. Assuming repetition priming of picture naming is contingent on accessing lexical phonology via semantics, the results suggest less‐skilled normal and disordered readers show a stronger bias towards a lexical– semantic pathway during word reading than skilled readers, and the severity of the phonological representations deficit modulates the strength of that bias in children with dyslexia.