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  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Function words constrain on-line recognition of nouns and verbs in French 18-month-olds
    (2014)
    Cauvet, Elodie
    ;
    Alves Limissuri, Rita
    ;
    Millotte, Severine
    ;
    Skoruppa, Katrin 
    ;
    Cabrol, Dominique
    ;
    Christophe, Anne
    In this experiment using the conditioned head-turn procedure, 18-month-old French-learning toddlers were trained to respond to either a target noun (“la balle”/the ball) or a target verb (“je mange”/I eat). They were then tested on target word recognition in two syntactic contexts: the target word was preceded either by a correct function word (“une balle”/a ball or “on mange”/they eat), or by an incorrect function word, signaling a word from the other category (*“on balle”/they ball or *“une mange”/a eat). We showed that 18-month-olds exploit the syntactic context on-line to recognize the target word: verbs were recognized when preceded by a personal pronoun but not when preceded by a determiner and vice-versa for nouns. These results suggest that 18-month-olds already know noun and verb contexts. As a result, they might be able to exploit them to categorize unknown words and constrain their possible meaning (nouns typically refer to objects whereas verbs typically refer to actions).
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    The Development of Word Stress Processing in French and Spanish Infants
    (2013)
    Skoruppa, Katrin 
    ;
    Pons, Ferran
    ;
    Bosch, Laura
    ;
    Christophe, Anne
    ;
    Cabrol, Dominique
    ;
    Peperkamp, Sharon
    This study focuses on the development of lexical stress perception during the first year of life. Previous research shows that cross-linguistic differences in word stress organization translate into differences in word stress processing from a very early age: At 9 months, Spanish-learning infants, learning a language with variable word stress, can discriminate between segmentally varied nonsense words with initial stress (e.g., níla, túli) and final stress (e.g., lutá, pukí) in a headturn preference procedure. However, French infants, who learn a language with fixed word stress, can only distinguish between initial and final stress when no segmental variability is involved (Skoruppa et al., 2009). The present study investigates the emergence of this cross-linguistic difference. We show that at six months, neither Spanish nor French infants encode stress patterns in the presence of segmental variability (Experiment 1), while both groups succeed in the absence of segmental variability (Experiment 2). Hence, only Spanish infants, who learn a variable stress language, get better at tracking stress patterns in segmentally varied words between the ages of 6 and 9 months. In contrast, all infants seem to be able to discriminate basic stress patterns in the absence of segmental variability during the first nine months of life, regardless of the status of stress in their native language.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Language-specific stress perception by 9-month-old French and Spanish infants
    (2009)
    Skoruppa, Katrin 
    ;
    Pons, Ferran
    ;
    Christophe, Anne
    ;
    Bosch, Laura
    ;
    Dupoux, Emmanuel
    ;
    Sebastián-Gallés, Núria
    ;
    Alves Limissuri, Rita
    ;
    Peperkamp, Sharon
    During the first year of life, infants begin to have difficulties perceiving non-native vowel and consonant contrasts, thus adapting their perception to the phonetic categories of the target language. In this paper, we examine the perception of a non-segmental feature, i.e. stress. Previous research with adults has shown that speakers of French (a language with fixed stress) have great difficulties in perceiving stress contrasts ( Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastián & Mehler, 1997 ), whereas speakers of Spanish (a language with lexically contrastive stress) perceive these contrasts as accurately as segmental contrasts. We show that language-specific differences in the perception of stress likewise arise during the first year of life. Specifically, 9-month-old Spanish infants successfully distinguish between stress-initial and stress-final pseudo-words, while French infants of this age show no sign of discrimination. In a second experiment using multiple tokens of a single pseudo-word, French infants of the same age successfully discriminate between the two stress patterns, showing that they are able to perceive the acoustic correlates of stress. Their failure to discriminate stress patterns in the first experiment thus reflects an inability to process stress at an abstract, phonological level.