4/5/2023 0 Comments Pupil measurement![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Note that in this long history of research on this topic, the categorical perception was originally theorized as a mechanism in which the emergence of categories creates a perceptual warping leading to a widening of the perceptual distance between categories, and a loss of perceptual distance between tokens within the same category. This suggests that the ability to parse acoustic continua into categorical percepts of prominence in both music and language may be present during the first months of life. Infants have been found to have a categorical perception of musical instruments and timbre in musical stimuli (Trehub & Thorpe, 1989 Trehub et al., 1987, 1990). Adult listeners have been shown to perceive a continuous variation in sound intensity (Durlach & Braida, 1969), temporal intervals (Burns & Ward, 1974 Sazaki et al., 1998), and tone intervals categorically (Siegel & Siegel, 1977 Locke & Kellar, 1973). Moreover, categorical perception is attested in the domain of music and non-linguistic sound. For speech, categorical perception has been observed with adults and infants for phonetic continua of consonants (Eimas et al., 1971 Liberman et al., 1967 Streeter, 1976) and lexical tones (e.g., Hallé et al., 2004 see Tsao & Liu, 2020 for a review). Categorical perception has been found across domains, including vision (for faces: Beale & Keil, 1995 facial expressions: Kotsoni et al., 2001 colors: Yang et al., 2016), audition (music: Siegel & Siegel, 1977 environmental sounds: Cutting, 1982) and speech (Liberman et al., 1957). Categorical perception is a mechanism through which humans and other animals (Green et al., 2020) filter the continuous variability in their environment into discrete categories. In particular, it is unknown whether infants’ prosodic discrimination abilities solely stem from sensitivity to the acoustic distance between prominent and non-prominent vowels, or whether they result from the establishment of prosodic categories, which could be revealed by categorical perception. While prosody is acquired early in development, starting in the womb, and it plays an important role in the initial stages of language development, little is known about how infants mentally represent prosodic regularities. In the present study, we test the unexplored issue of whether infants learning a language with a lexical stress contrast perceive such a contrast categorically, and investigate whether categorical perception (or: categorization, McMurray, 2022) is modulated by infants’ prior experience with music and infant-directed language registers at home. Moreover, infants start relying on language-specific prosodic cues for segmenting words from speech by about 4–6 months of age (e.g., Jusczyk et al., 1999 Nishibayashi et al., 2015). During the first year of life, infants rapidly acquire important prosodic features of their target language, as attested by studies showing cross-linguistic differences in infants’ sensitivity to lexical stress (Höhle et al., 2009 Skoruppa et al., 2009) and major prosodic boundaries (Johnson & Seidl, 2008 van Ommen et al., 2020). Because prosody is aligned with words and syntactic units, it may help infants learn the structural properties of their languages (Morgan & Demuth, 1996 Prieto & Esteve Gibert, 2018). At birth, human infants are sensitive to prosodic information that allows them to discriminate rhythmically different languages (Gasparini et al., 2021 Mehler et al., 1988) or syllable pairs differing in their stress patterns (Sansavini et al., 1997), pitch contours, or duration/pitch properties (Abboub et al., 2016). Language acquisition research suggests that prosody, that is, the suprasegmental aspects of language that include speech rhythm and prominence, is highly relevant for language acquisition. ![]()
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