Marina Nespor

Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati di Trieste | SISSA · ERC Pascal

One of the prominent ideas developed by Jacques Mehler and his colleagues was that perceptual tuning, present from birth on, enables infants, and language learners in general, to extract regularities from speech input. Here we discuss language learners'' ability to extract basic word order (VO or OV) structure from prosodic regularities in a langua...

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build...

Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition (Swingley, 2009). By the middle of the first year, infants seem to have solved this problem (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012; Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995), but it i...

Spoken language is governed by rhythm. Linguistic rhythm is hierarchical and the rhythmic hierarchy partially mimics the prosodic as well as the morpho-syntactic hierarchy of spoken language. It can thus provide learners with cues about the structure of the language they are acquiring. We identify three universal levels of linguistic rhythm – the s...

Human languages rely on the ability to learn and produce an indefinite number of words by combining consonants and vowels in a lawful manner. The categorization of speech representations into consonants and vowels is evidenced by the tendency of adult speakers, attested in many languages, to use consonants and vowels for different tasks. Consonants...

Research has demonstrated distinct roles for consonants and vowels in speech processing. For example, consonants have been shown to support lexical processes, such as the segmentation of speech based on transitional probabilities (TPs), more effectively than vowels. Theory and data so far, however, have considered only non-tone languages, that is t...

It is widely accepted that duration can be exploited as phonological phrase final lengthening in the segmentation of a novel language, i.e., in extracting discrete constituents from continuous speech. The use of final lengthening for segmentation and its facilitatory effect has been claimed to be universal. However, lengthening in the world languag...

The Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL) accounts for speech rhythm, grouping of sounds as either Iambs—if alternating in duration—or Trochees—if alternating in pitch and/or intensity. The two different rhythms signal word order, one of the basic syntactic properties of language. We investigated the extent to which Iambic and Trochaic phrases could be auditor...

From the first moments of their life, infants show a preference for their native language, as well as toward speakers with whom they share the same language. This preference appears to have broad consequences in various domains later on, supporting group affiliations and collaborative actions in children. Here, we propose that infants' preference f...

A major problem in second language acquisition (SLA) is the segmentation of fluent speech in the target language, i.e. detecting the boundaries of phonological constituents like words and phrases in the speech stream. To this end, among a variety of cues, people extensively use prosody and statistical regularities. We examined the role of pitch, du...

To what extent can language acquisition be explained in terms of different associative learning mechanisms? It has been hypothesized that distributional regularities in spoken languages are strong enough to elicit statistical learning about dependencies among speech units. Distributional regularities could be a useful cue for word learning even wit...

Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects with...

Humans sharewith non-human animals perceptual biases that might form the basis of complex cognitive abilities. One example comes from the principles described by the iambic-trochaic law (ITL). According to the ITL, sequences of sounds varying in duration are grouped as iambs, whereas sequences varying in intensity are grouped as trochees. These gro...

Infants' sensitivity to selectively attend to human speech and to process it in a unique way has been widely reported in the past. However, in order to successfully acquire language, one should also understand that speech is a referential, and that words can stand for other entities in the world. While there has been some evidence showing that youn...

Word orders are not distributed equally: SOV and SVO are the most prevalent among the world's languages. While there is a consensus that SOV might be the “default” order in human languages, the factors that trigger the preference for SVO are still a matter of debate. Here we provide a new perspective on word order preferences that emphasizes the ro...

To understand language, humans must encode information from rapid, sequential streams of syllables - tracking their order and organizing them into words, phrases, and sentences. We used Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) to determine whether human neonates are born with the capacity to track the positions of syllables in multisyllabic sequences. Aft...

On the basis and attentional effects of native language preference in infants WILD Conference, Stockholm, 2015 Marno, H. Guellai, B., Vidal Dos Santos, Y., Nespor, M. and Mehler, J. Native language perception has wide range of strong effects on infant’s social cognition from a very early age including newborns’ preference for listening to their...

In everyday life, speech is accompanied by gestures. In the present study, two experiments tested the possibility that spontaneous gestures accompanying speech carry prosodic information. Experiment 1 showed that gestures provide prosodic information, as adults are able to perceive the congruency between low-pass filtered-thus unintelligible-speech...

It has been suggested that speech and hand gestures could form a single system of communication that facilitates the interaction between the speaker and the listener. What kind of information do gestures carry? In the present study, we tested the possibility that spontaneous gestures accompanying speech carry prosodic information. Results show that...

Significance It is well known that across languages, certain structures are preferred to others. For example, syllables like blif are preferred to syllables like bdif and lbif . But whether such regularities reflect strictly historical processes, production pressures, or universal linguistic principles is a matter of much debate. To address this qu...

One universal feature of human languages is the division between grammatical functors and content words. From a learnability point of view, functors might provide entry points or anchors into the syntactic structure of utterances due to their high frequency. Despite its potentially universal scope, this hypothesis has not yet been tested on typolog...

A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of...

In this article we discuss experimental work on language acquisition that we have carried out in recent years. We first describe the most common methods used in infant research, then we concentrate on linguistic rhythm and the aspects of language that might be learned in the fi rst year of life on the basis of signals contained in the speech stream....

Recent research has shown that specific areas of the human brain are activated by speech from the time of birth. However, it is currently unknown whether newborns' brains also encode and remember the sounds of words when processing speech. The present study investigates the type of information that newborns retain when they hear words and the brain...

The iambic-trochaic law describes humans' tendency to form trochaic groups over sequences varying in pitch or intensity (i.e., the loudest or highest sounds mark group beginnings), and iambic groups over sequences varying in duration (i.e., the longest sounds mark group endings). The extent to which these perceptual biases are shared by humans and...

Language acquisition involves both acquiring a set of words (i.e. the lexicon) and learning the rules that combine them to form sentences (i.e. syntax). Here, we show that consonants are mainly involved in word processing, whereas vowels are favored for extracting and generalizing structural relations. We demonstrate that such a division of labor b...

The iambic-trochaic law has been proposed to account for the grouping of auditory stimuli: Sequences of sounds that differ only in duration are grouped as iambs (i.e., the most prominent element marks the end of a sequence of sounds), and sequences that differ only in pitch or intensity are grouped as trochees (i.e., the most prominent element mark...

Rhythm characterizes most natural phenomena: heartbeats have a rhythmic organization, and so do the waves of the sea, the alternation of day and night, and bird songs. Language is yet another natural phenomenon that is characterized by rhythm. What is rhythm? Is it possible to give a general enough definition of rhythm to include all the phenomena...

Two experiments investigated the way acoustic markers of prominence influence the grouping of speech sequences by adults and 7-month-old infants. In the first experiment, adults were familiarized with and asked to memorize sequences of adjacent syllables that alternated in either pitch or duration. During the test phase, participants heard pairs of...

We propose that the acoustic correlates of prominence at the level of the phonological phrase can guide the infant to the appropriate word order within a phrase. Our proposal relies on perceptual capacities well-attested in the pre-lingual infant, and thus provide a plausible psychological account for early acquisition of syntax. © Editorial matter...

We argue that the grammatical diversity observed among the world's languages emerges from the struggle between individual cognitive systems trying to impose their preferred structure on human language. We investigate the cognitive bases of the two most common word orders in the world's languages: SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and SVO. Evidence from lan...

A wide variety of organisms employ specialized mechanisms to cope with the demands of their environment. We suggest that the same is true for humans when acquiring artificial grammars, and at least some basic properties of natural grammars. We show that two basic mechanisms can explain many results in artificial grammar learning experiments, and di...

Consonants and vowels may play different roles during language processing, consonants being preferentially involved in lexical processing, and vowels tending to mark syntactic constituency through prosodic cues. In support of this view, artificial language learning studies have demonstrated that consonants (C) support statistical computations, wher...

The study of language acquisition during the first year of life is reviewed. We identified three areas that have contributed to our understanding of how the infant copes with linguistic signals to attain the most basic properties of its native language. Distributional properties present in the incoming utterances may allow infants to extract word c...

Cognitive neuroscience has focused on language acquisition as one of the main domains to test the respective roles of statistical vs. rule-like computation. Recent studies have uncovered that the brain of human neonates displays a typical signature in response to speech sounds even a few hours after birth. This suggests that neuroscience and lingui...

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic c...

We have proposed that consonants give cues primarily about the lexicon, whereas vowels carry cues about syntax. In a study supporting this hypothesis, we showed that when segmenting words from an artificial continuous stream, participants compute statistical relations over consonants, but not over vowels. In the study reported here, we tested the s...

How do infants start learning the syntax of the language they are exposed to? In this paper, we examine a plausible mechanism for the acquisi-tion of the relative order of heads and complements. We hypothesize that the iambic-trochaic law determines the physical realization of main prominence within phonological phrases that contain more than one w...

Sensitivity to prosodic cues might be used to constrain lexical search. Indeed, the prosodic organization of speech is such that words are invariably aligned with phrasal prosodic edges, providing a cue to segmentation. In this paper we devise an experimental paradigm that allows us to investigate the interaction between statistical and prosodic cu...

This paper reviews studies of language processing with the aim of establishing whether any type of statistical information embedded in linguistic signals can be exploited by the language learner. The constraints as to the information that can be so used, we will argue, should be used to inform theories of language acquisition. We present two experi...

M. Peña, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler argued that humans compute nonadjacent statistical relations among syllables in a continuous artificial speech stream to extract words, but they use other computations to determine the structural properties of words. Instead, when participants are familiarized with a segmented stream, structural gene...

Cognitive neuroscience has focused on language acquisition as one of the main domains to test the respective roles of statistical vs. rule-like computation. Recent studies have uncovered that the brain of human neconates displays a typical signature in response to speech sounds even a few hours after birth. This suggests that neuroscience and lingu...

Speech is produced mainly in continuous streams containing several words. Listeners can use the transitional probability (TP) between adjacent and non-adjacent syllables to segment "words" from a continuous stream of artificial speech, much as they use TPs to organize a variety of perceptual continua. It is thus possible that a general-purpose stat...

In organisms endowed with a disposition to acquire grammar, the beginnings of language learning can be detected at the onset of life (Chomsky 1965, 1980). Under the assumption that some universal properties of grammar are part of the human genetic endowment, we still have to explain how particular languages are acquired. One strong hypothesis that...

In this paper, we argue that the location of the focused constituent within a sentence, as well as the definition of all the constituents that might be interpreted as focused, is predictable on the basis of the syntax of a given language. The major (though not only) division across languages as to the distribution of focus is related to the degree...

We propose that infants may learn about the relative order of heads and complements in their language before they know many words, on the basis of prosodic information (relative prominence within phonological phrases). We present experimental evidence that 6-12-week-old infants can discriminate two languages that differ in their head direction and...

Editors’ preface Research into Language Typology poses two intriguing and related challenges to the linguist. One the one hand there is the challenge of isolating empirical data that either at long last seem to fill an inexplicable gap in what is commonly thought natural languages should be like, or that conversely call into question hitherto hous...

Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebraic-like computations to discover higher level (grammatical) structure. Here we show that these computations can be influenced by subtle cues in the speech signal. After a short familiarization to a continuous speech stream, adult listeners are able to...

We propose that infants may learn about the relative order of heads and complements in their language before they know many words, on the basis of prosodic information (relative prominence within phonological phrases). We present experimental evidence that 6–12-week-old infants can discriminate two languages that differ in their head direction and...

Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants' capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language cl...

Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants' capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language cl...

This is a study of the interaction of phonology with syntax, and, to some extent, with meaning, in a natural sign language. It adopts the theory of prosodic phonology (Nespor & Vogel, 1986), testing both its assumptions, which had been based on data from spoken language, and its predictions, on the language of the deaf community in Israel. Evidence...

Abstract Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account,for infants’ capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for la...

We report the case of an aphasic patient who, following an acquired lesion involving the left temporo-parietal cortex, produced many word stress errors in spontaneous speech, naming of objects and reading aloud. The stress impairment concerned exclusively words in which stress was unpredictable on the basis of syllabic structure, and was equally se...

''Phonological bootstrapping" is the hypothesis that a purely phonological analysis of the speech signal may allow infants to start acquiring the lexicon and syntax of their native language (Morgan & Demuth, 1996a). To assess this hypothesis, a first step is to estimate how much information is provided by a phonological analysis of the speech input...

We propose that infants may learn about the relative order of heads and complements in their language before they know many words, on the basis of prosodic information (relative prominence within phonological phrases). We present experimental evidence that 6–12-week-old infants can discriminate two languages that differ in their head direction and...

This paper deals with a case of morphology – phonology interaction, specifically, stress in Greek compounding. It is claimed that two types of compounds are distinguished with respect to the stressing procedure: a) [stem + stem] compounds, submitted to the application of the antepenultimate stress rule, and b) [stem + word] and [word + word] compou...