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      European Portuguese-Learning Infants Look Longer at Iambic Stress: New Data on Language Specificity in Early Stress Perception

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          Abstract

          The ability to perceive lexical stress patterns has been shown to develop in language-specific ways. However, previous studies have examined this ability in languages that are either clearly stress-based (favoring the development of a preference for trochaic stress, like English and German) or syllable-based (favoring the development of no stress preferences, like French, Spanish, and Catalan) and/or where the frequency distributions of stress patterns provide clear data for a predominant pattern (like English and Hebrew). European Portuguese (EP) is a different type of language, which presents conflicting sets of cues related to rhythm, frequency, and stress correlates that challenge existing accounts of early stress perception. Using an anticipatory eye movement (AEM) paradigm implemented with eye-tracking, EP-learning infants at 5–6 months demonstrated sensitivity to the trochaic/iambic stress contrast, with evidence of asymmetrical perception or preference for iambic stress. These results are not predicted by the rhythmic account of developing stress perception, and suggest that the language-particular phonological patterns impacting the frequency of trochaic and iambic stress, beyond lexical words with two or more syllables, together with the prosodic correlates of stress, drive the early acquisition of lexical stress. Our findings provide the first evidence of sensitivity to stress patterns in the presence of segmental variability by 5–6 months, and highlight the importance of testing developing stress perception in languages with diverse combinations of rhythmic, phonological, and phonetic properties.

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          Most cited references45

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          When does native language input affect phonetic perception? The precocious case of lexical tone

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            Prosody guides the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-mo-old infants.

            Human infants are predisposed to rapidly acquire their native language. The nature of these predispositions is poorly understood, but is crucial to our understanding of how infants unpack their speech input to recover the fundamental word-like units, assign them referential roles, and acquire the rules that govern their organization. Previous researchers have demonstrated the role of general distributional computations in prelinguistic infants' parsing of continuous speech. We extend these findings to more naturalistic conditions, and find that 6-mo-old infants can simultaneously segment a nonce auditory word form from prosodically organized continuous speech and associate it to a visual referent. Crucially, however, this mapping occurs only when the word form is aligned with a prosodic phrase boundary. Our findings suggest that infants are predisposed very early in life to hypothesize that words are aligned with prosodic phrase boundaries, thus facilitating the word learning process. Further, and somewhat paradoxically, we observed successful learning in a more complex context than previously studied, suggesting that learning is enhanced when the language input is well matched to the learner's expectations.
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              Multimodal events and moving locations: eye movements of adults and 6-month-olds reveal dynamic spatial indexing.

              The ability to keep track of locations in a dynamic, multimodal environment is crucial for successful interactions with other people and objects. The authors investigated the existence and flexibility of spatial indexing in adults and 6-month-old infants by adapting an eye-tracking paradigm from D. C. Richardson and M. J. Spivey (2000). Multimodal events were presented in specific locations, and eye movements were measured when the auditory portion of the stimulus was presented without its visual counterpart. Experiment 1 showed that adults spatially index auditory information even when the original associated locations move. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that infants are capable of both binding multimodal events to locations and tracking those locations when they move. ((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                28 August 2020
                2020
                : 11
                : 1890
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Center of Linguistics, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon , Lisbon, Portugal
                [2] 2Research and Enterprise Development, University of Bristol , Bristol, United Kingdom
                [3] 3Faculté des Sciences Économiques, Université de Neuchâtel , Neuchâtel, Switzerland
                Author notes

                Edited by: Montserrat Comesaña, University of Minho, Portugal

                Reviewed by: Monika Molnar, University of Toronto, Canada; Ana Paula Soares, University of Minho, Portugal

                This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01890
                7484472
                14a1d88f-bf3e-4baa-b738-eba68def1433
                Copyright © 2020 Frota, Butler, Uysal, Severino and Vigário.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 02 April 2020
                : 09 July 2020
                Page count
                Figures: 6, Tables: 2, Equations: 0, References: 77, Pages: 14, Words: 11123
                Funding
                Funded by: Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology
                Award ID: EXCL/MHCLIN/0688/2012
                Funded by: European Regional Development Fund 10.13039/501100008530
                Award ID: PTDC/LLT-LIN/29338/2017
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                infant stress perception,iambic stress,eye-tracking,anticipatory looking,phonology and phonetics of stress,rhythm,frequency

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