[lingtalks] Chandan Narayan's Talk at U.C.S.D.

[Catherine Alioto]

U.C.S.D presents a talk by Chandan Narayan, University of Pennsylvania
Thursday, February 15, 2007
12:00 - 2:00 pm
Applied Physics and Mathematics Building
Multimedia Room #4301

TITLE:
The intersections of developmental speech perception, acoustic salience, and
phonological typology

ABSTRACT:
Infants perform remarkably well on speech 
perception tasks. Their abilities are highlighted by
the successful discrimination of non-native 
phonetic contrasts, which their adult
counterparts have difficulty discriminating. By 
the end of their first year, however, infants’
perceptual space is thought to be pruned so as to 
best represent native language contrasts.
In general, the infant speech research community 
has converged on the notion that infants
arrive at the language-learning table equipped 
with a general sensitivity to the myriad phonetic
contrasts found in the world’s languages and that 
experience with the ambient language
reorganizes the infant’s emerging phonology in 
language specific ways. In this talk I pose a
challenge to this hypothesis—a challenge 
supported by cross-language developmental findings,
the mediating role of acoustic salience in the 
processing of phonetic contrasts, and
patterns in phonological typology.

I take as my starting point the asymmetrical 
distribution of nasal place in the world’s
languages, where the syllable onset /m/-/n/ 
contrast is typologically very common while
contrasts such as onset /n/-/N/ are less common. 
Based on analyses showing that onset
/n/ and /N/ are acoustically less distinct than 
onset /m/ and /n/ in languages such as
Filipino (Austronesian), which contrasts all 
three sounds in onset position, a series of
infant experiments was conducted in order to 
explore the contribution of acoustic salience
to the development of speech perception. 
English-hearing infants, aged 4-12 months, were
presented with two Filipino nasal place 
contrasts: the native, and typologically common
[ma]-[na] contrast, and the non-native less 
common [na]-[Na]. While the [ma]-[na] contrast
was discriminated across development, [na]-[Na] 
was not discriminated. Crucially, English-
hearing infants did not discriminate the 
[na]-[Na] contrast even at ages (4-8 months) when
they might be expected to successfully 
discriminate the contrast according to previous
literature on non-native consonant perception. 
When Filipino-hearing infants were presented the
native [na]-[Na] contrast, they succeeded in 
making the discrimination only at 10-12 months,
but not at younger ages.

These results suggest a new pattern in the 
development of speech perception that is
different from the classic finding for the 
development of oral consonant perception. I argue
that the initial state of infant speech 
perception reflects acoustically robust contrasts, with
finer acoustic detail segregating phonetic 
categories emerging as a consequence of experience
with the native language. The infant results are 
mirrored not only by acoustic analyses of
the Filipino tokens, but also by corresponding 
studies with Filipino-speaking adults revealing
a greater perceptual sensitivity to the [ma]-[na] contrast than to [na]-[Na].

The talk concludes with a discussion of the 
potential learning mechanisms that infants
might exploit in disambiguating acoustically 
similar phones in the ambient language. In
particular, I explore recent work linking 
conceptual processing in infancy and speech perception,
suggesting that minimal pair associations might 
serve as an imperative for the infant to
attend to those aspects of the acoustic signal 
that may have been ignored in discrimination
tasks.








At 01:12 PM 2/12/2007, Catherine Alioto wrote:
>Dear Computer Help,
>
>I need to send this title and talk out today to 
>different link addresses.  But because it is in 
>a PDF file I cannot copy it in order to email it 
>to the links.  Please format it so I can copy it to send it out.
>
>Thanks,
>Catherine
>
>>Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 15:29:21 -0500
>>From: Chandan Narayan <cnarayan at sas.upenn.edu>
>>User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 (Windows/20061207)
>>To: Catherine Alioto <calioto at ling.ucsd.edu>
>>Subject: Talk abstract
>>X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.58 on 132.239.165.2
>>X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.53 on 192.168.1.5
>>X-Spam-Not-Checked: Messages over 100K not checked
>>
>>
>>Dear Catherine,
>>Attached is a copy of the abstract for my talk 
>>next month. I'm attaching it in PDF and PS format (for font considerations).
>>
>>The title of the talk is:
>>"The intersections of developmental speech 
>>perception, acoustic salience, and phonological typology"
>>
>>Thanks again!
>>Chandan
>>
>>--
>>chandan r. narayan
>>postdoctoral fellow
>>institute for research in cognitive science
>>university of pennsylvania
>>3401 walnut st., suite 400a
>>philadelphia, pa 19104-6228
>>cnarayan at sas.upenn.edu
>>ph. 215.898.0357
>>
>
>Catherine Alioto
>Assistant to the Chair
>Academic Affairs Coordinator
>University of California, San Diego
>Department of Linguistics
>McGill Hall
>9500 Gilman Drive
>La Jolla, California 92093-0108
>(858) 534-3601
>
>

Catherine Alioto
Assistant to the Chair
Academic Affairs Coordinator
University of California, San Diego
Department of Linguistics
McGill Hall
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, California 92093-0108
(858) 534-3601
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