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Bosch

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The experimenters were interested in the 2 monolingual groups. Stimuli: ... The Catalan monolingual group, which is exposed to this vowel contrast in its ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Bosch


1
Bosch Sebastián-Gallés
  • Simultaneous Bilingualism and the Perception of a
    Language-Specific Vowel Contrast in the First
    Year of Life

2
Introduction
  • This research explores the behaviour of
    monolingual Spanish and monolingual Catalan
    infants, in order to analyze their perception of
    native-sound contrasts.
  • Because other research has been done on
    monosyllabic stimuli, this study used a more
    complex structure (CV1CV2).
  • The vowel contrast studied was /e/ and /e/.

3
Hypotheses
  • Experiment 1
  • All three subgroups would perceive the vowel
    contrast at 4 months of age.
  • Experiment 2
  • However, at the age of 8 months, only the
    monolingual Catalan group should perceive the
    vowel contrast.

4
Experiment 1
  • Subjects
  • 36 infants of 4 months of age were recruited
  • 3 groups of 12 infants
  • Catalan monolinguals
  • Spanish monolinguals
  • Catalan-Spanish bilinguals
  • The experimenters were interested in the 2
    monolingual groups.

5
Stimuli
  • The contrastive category that is studied is the
    Catalan vowel contrast /e/ and /e/ (two midfront
    vowels) in a CV1CV2 context.
  • In determining the infants discrimination
    capacities, the experimenters
  • placed the vowel in the first stressed syllable
    of a pseudoword
  • used several tokens from five different females
    (variability).

6
Stimuli (cont)
  • Pseudowords dV.?i with V /e/ and /e/.
  • 18 tokens were recorded from 5 females (native
    speakers of Catalan and Spanish)
  • Motherese style

7
Stimuli (cont)
  • How were the stimuli chosen?
  • Acoustic perspective vs phonetic perspective
  • Formants of each token

8
Procedure
  • Head-turn preference procedure
  • An image on the center monitor appears to capture
    the infants attention and to have him focused.
  • A speech stimulus is presented to the infant from
    either the left or right loudspeaker.
  • If there is a change in the speech stimulus, the
    infant will turn his head towards the stimulus.
  • If the child turns his head on the right side, a
    picture will appear on the monitor
    (reinforcement).
  • (source http//www.psych.ubc.ca/jwlabmgr/met
    h_cond.html)

9
Procedure (cont)
  • familiarization phase
  • based on the infants looking behavior
  • half of the infants were familiarized with
    de?i, the other half with de?i
  • each infant had to accumulate 2 minutes of
    sustained attention
  • testing phase
  • listening of contrastive materials
  • there is discrimination when there is
    differential attention time (greater listening
    time) between similar and novel materials
  • the similar materials are the tokens presented in
    the familiarization phase.

10
Familiarization phase
  • Structure of a trial
  • Two sets of 6 tokens from the same vowel category
    were presented to the infant.
  • Up to 6 trials of 25 seconds were needed to
    obtain a 2 minute sustained attention.
  • Group 1 Group 2
  • de?i de?i de?i de?i
  • de?i de?i de?i de?i
  • de?i de?i de?i de?i
  • de?i de?i de?i de?i
  • de?i de?i de?i de?i
  • de?i de?i de?i de?i
  • x2 x2 x2 x2

11
Testing Phase
  • New tokens of the same category of vowels from
    the familiarization phase are presented to the
    infant
  • Contrastive tokens are presented to both groups.
  • Infants react to those tokens by staring

12
Results Experiment 1
  • Mean attention time

13
Results Experiment 1
  • Hypothesis confirmed
  • An infant of 4 months can discriminate the vowel
    contrast of /e/ and /e/ within the first syllable
    of a disyllabic CVCV stimulus.
  • They can also normalize for talker and token
    variability.
  • This shows that at 4 months, the ambient language
    still has no effect on their ability to
    discriminate vowel contrasts.

14
Experiment 2
  • For the second experiment, Bosch and
    Sebastián-Gallés were interested in analyzing the
    impact that linguistic exposure would have on
    eight-month-old infants ability to perceive
    vowel contrasts.

15
Hypotheses
  • Since these two categories are present only in
    Catalan, eight-month-old infants coming from
    Catalan-speaking families should discriminate
    them.
  • However, infants coming from Spanish-speaking
    families should not be able to perceive the
    contrast as easily since it is not present in
    their language.

16
Subjects Stimuli
  • Subjects
  • 8 month old infants
  • 3 groups participated in this experiment
  • Catalan monolinguals
  • Spanish monolinguals
  • Catalan-Spanish bilinguals
  • Stimuli
  • Same vowel contrasts (/e/ and /e/) from
    Experiment 1.

17
Results Experiment 2
  • Mean attention time

18
Results Experiment 2 (cont)
  • The Catalan monolingual group, which is exposed
    to this vowel contrast in its linguistic
    environment, has no problem perceiving it.
  • On the other hand, eight-month-old infants from
    Spanish monolingual environment might only
    perceive the two vowels as being different ways
    of producing the same vowel.

19
Discussion
  • The results of both experiments confirm the
    following predictions 
  • At four months, babies from both Catalan
    monolinguial and Spanish monolingual environments
    can discriminate the Catalan vowel contrast
    /e/-/e/.
  • At eight months, only infants from the Catalan
    monolingual environment can perceive the
    contrast, showing that linguistic exposure might
    alter these language-general initial
    sensitivities.

20
Lets Wrap it Up!!!
  • The experiments have shown with different
    contrasts that at the age of 4 months, infants
    are universal listeners.
  • We can also see that around 8 months of age,
    infants start to lose the sensitivity to
    discriminate languages and they become more
    sensitive to the contrasts in their mother tongue.
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