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    • For phonetic learning this raises the

    2018-11-03

    For phonetic learning, this raises the question of whether infants’ perceptual attunement is likewise context-dependent, taking into account language-specific phonological processes and the contexts in which they apply. Nine-month-old infants are sensitive to phonological context: they have acquired constraints upon the sequencing of phonemes within syllables and words in their language (i.e., phonotactics), and prefer to listen to phoneme sequences that are phonotactically legal or frequent as opposed to illegal or infrequent (Friederici and Wessels, 1993; Jusczyk et al., 1993; Jusczyk and Luce, 1994). Moreover, 14-month-old infants show some evidence of context-sensitive perceptual attunement: Japanese infants of this age perceive an illusory vowel within consonant clusters that are illegal in their language (Mazuka et al., 2011), similarly to Japanese adults (Dehaene-Lambertz et al., 2000; Dupoux et al., 1999). However, whether and how language-specific phonological processes (like French voicing assimilation) influence infants’ capacity to discriminate native phoneme contrasts in the context of these processes has not been investigated. In the present study, we thus tested whether French 14-month-olds, who have already lost the ability to distinguish non-native contrasts, are also insensitive to the native voicing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor when it occurs in an assimilation context. We recorded high-density EEG, using a mismatch trial design as in Peña et al. (2012). We analyzed the presence or absence of a MMR in response to a voicing change in two types of context, one that allows and one that does not allow for voicing assimilation. The MMR is particularly suited to study native phoneme discrimination, given its sensitivity to the linguistic relevance of the phonetic change in the participant’s native language (Dehaene-Lambertz and Baillet, 1998; Näätänen et al., 1997). If 14-month-olds have already developed sensitivity to the native process of voicing assimilation, they should − like French adults − exhibit a MMR in response to a voicing change only in contexts that cannot trigger voicing assimilation in French. Alternatively, if they have not yet developed this sensitivity, they should exhibit a MMR to a voicing change regardless of context.
    Material and methods
    Results
    Discussion We showed that 14 month-old French-learning infants’ capacity to discriminate a native voicing contrast is context-dependent. That is, similarly to French adults (Sun et al., 2015), they exhibit a MMR to a voicing change when the following sound is a nasal (No Assimilation context) but not when the following sound is an obstruent (Assimilation context). This, then, is evidence for a novel type of perceptual attunement. More specifically, the present results show that at 14 months of age, French-learning infants have not only constructed their native phoneme inventory, they have also acquired some knowledge about language-specific interactions among phonemes. Indeed, French voicing assimilation – a phonological process that changes the voicing of a consonant – applies before obstruents but not before nasals; infants have thus acquired this context-dependent neutralization of the voicing contrast. A straightforward interpretation of our results is that infants compensate for voicing changes in assimilation contexts. That is, given that [ofbe] is usually pronounced as [ovbe], they automatically retrieve the form [ofbe] upon hearing [ovbe]. Direct evidence for such compensation at an older age has been shown with a word recognition task (Skoruppa et al., 2013). In this study, 24-month-old French toddlers were tested in a looking-while-listening paradigm. Target pictures of familiar objects whose name ends in a consonant that can undergo assimilation (e.g., an egg – French: oeuf [œf]) were presented side-by-side with distracter pictures of unfamiliar objects. In the probe sentences, the target name was pronounced with a final voicing change either in an assimilation context, i.e. before an obstruent (e.g., ‘Look at the egg in front of you.’) or in a no-assimilation context, i.e. before a nasal (e.g., ‘Look at the egg now.’). Toddlers looked longer at the target pictures in the assimilation than in the no-assimilation context. Thus, they more often considered the assimilated form of the target words as a possible instance of these words when the context allowed for voicing assimilation than when age structure did not. In other words, they showed context-specific compensation for their native process of voicing assimilation (see Darcy et al. (2009), for a similar study with French adults). As shown by the EEG study with adults reported in Sun et al. (2015), compensation for assimilation influences not only word recognition but also phonetic discrimination. Using a subset of Sun et al. (2015)’s stimuli and an adapted paradigm, we provide evidence that this type of context-dependent perceptual attunement is already in place at 14 months of age.