TY - JOUR
T1 - Constraints on infants' ability to extract non-adjacent dependencies from vowels and consonants
AU - Weyers, Ivonne
AU - Männel, Claudia
AU - Mueller, Jutta L
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors
PY - 2022/10
Y1 - 2022/10
N2 - Language acquisition requires infants' ability to track dependencies between distant speech elements. Infants as young as 3 months have been shown to successfully identify such non-adjacent dependencies between syllables, and this ability has been related to the maturity of infants' pitch processing. The present study tested whether 8- to 10-month-old infants (N = 68) can also learn dependencies at smaller segmental levels and whether the relation between dependency and pitch processing extends to other auditory features. Infants heard either syllable sequences encoding an item-specific dependency between non-adjacent vowels or between consonants. These frequent standard sequences were interspersed with infrequent intensity deviants and dependency deviants, which violated the non-adjacent relationship. Both vowel and consonant groups showed electrophysiological evidence for detection of the intensity manipulation. However, evidence for dependency learning was only found for infants hearing the dependencies across vowels, not consonants, and only in a subgroup of infants who had an above-average language score in a behavioral test. In a correlation analysis, we found no relation between intensity and dependency processing. We conclude that item-specific, segment-based non-adjacent dependencies are not easily learned by infants and if so, vowels are more accessible to the task, but only to infants who display advanced language skills.
AB - Language acquisition requires infants' ability to track dependencies between distant speech elements. Infants as young as 3 months have been shown to successfully identify such non-adjacent dependencies between syllables, and this ability has been related to the maturity of infants' pitch processing. The present study tested whether 8- to 10-month-old infants (N = 68) can also learn dependencies at smaller segmental levels and whether the relation between dependency and pitch processing extends to other auditory features. Infants heard either syllable sequences encoding an item-specific dependency between non-adjacent vowels or between consonants. These frequent standard sequences were interspersed with infrequent intensity deviants and dependency deviants, which violated the non-adjacent relationship. Both vowel and consonant groups showed electrophysiological evidence for detection of the intensity manipulation. However, evidence for dependency learning was only found for infants hearing the dependencies across vowels, not consonants, and only in a subgroup of infants who had an above-average language score in a behavioral test. In a correlation analysis, we found no relation between intensity and dependency processing. We conclude that item-specific, segment-based non-adjacent dependencies are not easily learned by infants and if so, vowels are more accessible to the task, but only to infants who display advanced language skills.
KW - Artificial language
KW - Consonants
KW - EEG
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Non-adjacent dependency
KW - Vowels
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85137181318&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101149
DO - 10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101149
M3 - Article
C2 - 36084447
VL - 57
JO - Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
JF - Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
SN - 1878-9293
M1 - 101149
ER -