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Neural indicators of articulator-specific sensorimotor influences on infant speech perception Choi, Dawoon; Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine; Peña, Marcela; Werker, Janet Feldman, 1951-

Abstract

While there is increasing acceptance that even young infants detect correspondences between heard and seen speech, the common view is that oral-motor movements related to speech production cannot influence speech perception until infants begin to babble or speak. We investigated the extent of multimodal speech influences on auditory speech perception in prebabbling infants who have limited speech-like oral-motor repertoires. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how sensorimotor influences to the infant’s own articulatory movements impact auditory speech perception in 3-mo-old infants. In experiment 1, there were ERP discriminative responses to phonetic category changes across two phonetic contrasts (bilabial–dental /ba/-/ɗa/; dental–retroflex /ɗa/-/ɖa/) in a mismatch paradigm, indicating that infants auditorily discriminated both contrasts. In experiment 2, inhibiting infants’ own tongue-tip movements had a disruptive influence on the early ERP discriminative response to the /ɗa/-/ɖa/ contrast only. The same articulatory inhibition had contrasting effects on the perception of the /ba/-/ɗa/ contrast, which requires different articulators (the lips vs. the tongue) during production, and the /ɗa/-/ɖa/ contrast, whereby both phones require tongue-tip movement as a place of articulation. This articulatory distinction between the two contrasts plausibly accounts for the distinct influence of tongue-tip suppression on the neural responses to phonetic category change perception in definitively prebabbling, 3-mo-old, infants. The results showing a specificity in the relation between oral-motor inhibition and phonetic speech discrimination suggest a surprisingly early mapping between auditory and motor speech representation already in prebabbling infants.

Item Metadata

Title
Neural indicators of articulator-specific sensorimotor influences on infant speech perception
Creator
Choi, Dawoon; Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine; Peña, Marcela; Werker, Janet Feldman, 1951-
Date Issued
2021-05-12
Description
While there is increasing acceptance that even young infants detect correspondences between heard and seen speech, the common view is that oral-motor movements related to speech production cannot influence speech perception until infants begin to babble or speak. We investigated the extent of multimodal speech influences on auditory speech perception in prebabbling infants who have limited speech-like oral-motor repertoires. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how sensorimotor influences to the infant’s own articulatory movements impact auditory speech perception in 3-mo-old infants. In experiment 1, there were ERP discriminative responses to phonetic category changes across two phonetic contrasts (bilabial–dental /ba/-/ɗa/; dental–retroflex /ɗa/-/ɖa/) in a mismatch paradigm, indicating that infants auditorily discriminated both contrasts. In experiment 2, inhibiting infants’ own tongue-tip movements had a disruptive influence on the early ERP discriminative response to the /ɗa/-/ɖa/ contrast only. The same articulatory inhibition had contrasting effects on the perception of the /ba/-/ɗa/ contrast, which requires different articulators (the lips vs. the tongue) during production, and the /ɗa/-/ɖa/ contrast, whereby both phones require tongue-tip movement as a place of articulation. This articulatory distinction between the two contrasts plausibly accounts for the distinct influence of tongue-tip suppression on the neural responses to phonetic category change perception in definitively prebabbling, 3-mo-old, infants. The results showing a specificity in the relation between oral-motor inhibition and phonetic speech discrimination suggest a surprisingly early mapping between auditory and motor speech representation already in prebabbling infants.
Genre
Article
Type
Text
Language
eng
Notes
Open access funding provided by the UBC Open Access Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences Research.
Date Available
2023-05-31
Provider
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
DOI
10.14288/1.0432754
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84732
Affiliation
Arts, Faculty of; Psychology, Department of; Non UBC
Citation
Choi, Dawoon, et al. "Neural Indicators of Articulator-Specific Sensorimotor Influences on Infant Speech Perception." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, vol. 118, no. 20, 2021, pp. 1.
Publisher DOI
10.1073/pnas.2025043118
Peer Review Status
Reviewed
Scholarly Level
Faculty; Postdoctoral; Researcher
Rights URI
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International