Abstract processing of syllabic structures in early infancy

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• dc.contributor.author Santolin, Chiara
• dc.contributor.author Zacharaki, Konstantina
• dc.contributor.author Toro Soto, Juan Manuel, 1976-
• dc.contributor.author Sebastian-Galles, Nuria
• dc.date.accessioned 2024-03-25T06:53:37Z
• dc.date.available 2024-03-25T06:53:37Z
• dc.date.issued 2024
• dc.description Includes supplementary materials for the online appendix.
• dc.description.abstract Syllables are one of the fundamental building blocks of early language acquisition. From birth onwards, infants preferentially segment, process and represent the speech into syllable-sized units, raising the question of what type of computations infants are able to perform on these perceptual units. Syllables are abstract units structured in a way that allows grouping phonemes into sequences. The goal of this research was to investigate 4-to-5-month-old infants' ability to encode the internal structure of syllables, at a target age when the language system is not yet specialized on the sounds and the phonotactics of native languages. We conducted two experiments in which infants were first familiarized to lists of syllables implementing either CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) or CCV (consonant-consonant-vowel) structures, then presented with new syllables implementing both structures at test. Experiments differ in the degree of phonological similarity between the materials used at familiarization and test. Results show that infants were able to differentiate syllabic structures at test, even when test syllables were implemented by combinations of phonemes that infants did not hear before. Only infants familiarized with CVC syllables discriminated the structures at test, pointing to a processing advantage for CVC over CCV structures. This research shows that, in addition to preferentially processing the speech into syllable-sized units, during the first months of life, infants are also capable of performing fine-grained computations within such units.
• dc.description.sponsorship We give special thanks to Luca Bonatti for the helpful feedbacks on this work. We thank Valentina Ferrario for the offline coding of the familiarization phase, and Gonzalo Garcia-Castro and Ege Ekin Özer for inspiring discussions on these results. We are grateful to Pam Miller for proofreading the manuscript, and Xavier Mayoral, Silvia Blanch, Katia Pistrin of the Laboratori de Recerca en Infancia for their invaluable help during data collection. We are extremely grateful to the infants and the families who participated in the study. C.S. was supported by a Juan de la Cierva post-doctoral fellowship (IJC2019-041548-I/AEI/10.13039/501100011033). N.S.G. was supported by the project PID2021-123416NB-I00/MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, financed by the Spanish Ministerio of Science and Innovation,the State Research Agency and the European Regional Development Fund, and by ICREA Academia 2018 award (P-5993) financed by the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA). J.M.T was supported by the project PID2021-123973NB I00/MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, financed by the Spanish Ministerio of Science and Innovation, the State Research Agency and the European Regional Development Fund. N.S.G and J.M.T. were also supported by the project 2021 SGR 00911 financed by the Catalan Generalitat AGAUR.
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
• dc.identifier.citation Santolin C, Zacharaki K, Toro JM, Sebastian-Galles N. Abstract processing of syllabic structures in early infancy. Cognition. 2024 Mar;244:105663. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105663
• dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105663
• dc.identifier.issn 0010-0277
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/59537
• dc.language.iso eng
• dc.publisher Elsevier
• dc.relation.ispartof Cognition. 2024 Mar;244:105663
• dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/3PE/PID2021-123973NB-I00
• dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/3PE/PID2021-123416NB-I00
• dc.rights © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
• dc.subject.keyword Syllable
• dc.subject.keyword Linguistic structure
• dc.subject.keyword Abstract processing
• dc.subject.keyword Learning
• dc.subject.keyword Infancy
• dc.title Abstract processing of syllabic structures in early infancy
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion