Nikola Paillereau

The Czech Academy of Sciences | AVCR · Psychological Institute

This article reviews empirical methods and findings on early language discrimination, questioning rhythm‐class based hypotheses on language discrimination in infancy, as well as the assumption that early language discrimination is driven primarily (or solely) by temporal prosodic cues. The present work argues that within‐rhythm class discrimination...

Purpose This article reviews 43 adaptations of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs), a tool used for measuring children's communicative and language skills. The aim is to provide an overview of different approaches to develop local versions of the instrument (reflecting linguistic and cultural specifics) and to formul...

Speech rhythm is considered one of the first windows into the native language, and the taxonomy of rhythm classes is commonly used to explain early language discrimination. Relying on formal rhythm classification is problematic for two reasons. First, it is not known to which extent infants' sensitivity to language variation is attributable to rhyt...

The young universal listener is an established concept in psycholinguistics. However, it is unclear what abilities universal perception entails and at what age it exists. This paper aims to motivate rethinking about what it means to be a universal listener. Early and recent studies on infant speech acquisition are reviewed, considered in the light...

At the babbling stage, the syllable does not have the temporal characteristics of adult syllables because of the infant's limited oro-motor skills. This research aims to further our knowledge of syllable duration and temporal variability and their evolution with age as an indicator of the development of articulatory skills. The possible impact of s...

Objectives. This article reports on the adaptation procedure of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI): Words & Gestures into Czech. The parental-report questionnaire screens communicative development in infants aged 8 to 18 months and focuses on general communicative skills, active and passive vocabulary, and communicativ...

When interacting with young children, talkers across many languages use a speech style that reflects positive affect, draws infants' attention, and supposedly facilitates language acquisition. As for the latter, a well-documented feature of infant-directed speech is an exaggeration of spectrally-cued vowel contrasts. Here we tested whether talkers...

The perceptual attunement to native vowel categories has been reported to occur at 6 months of age. However, some languages contrast vowels both in quality and in length, and whether and how the acquisition of spectral and duration-cued contrasts differs is uncertain. This study traced the development of infants' sensitivity to native (Czech) vowel...

This paper provides a comprehensive account of spectral and duration-al characteristics of Czech monophthongal vowels. It improves on the existing literature (that almost exclusively focused on read speech) in that it examines vowels in spontaneous speech recorded from 10 men and 10 women, who were recruited from the general population not restrict...

Cette étude acoustico-perceptive traite de la possibilité de prononcer le français langue étrangère de manière native lorsque son apprentissage débute tardivement. Dix tchécophones, étudiant le français à l’université afin de devenir enseignantes, produisent six voyelles moyennes du français en contexte isolé /ø, œ, o, ɔ, e, ɛ/. L’analyse des forma...

Researchers in the field of the teaching and learning of phonetics agree that learners of a foreign/second language (L2) acquire identical vowels by positive transfer from their first language (L1). This statement prompted us to examine whether the French and Czech languages, differing in the size of their vowel inventories, possess any identical v...

Coarticulatory effects of labial, dental, palato-velar and uvular places of articulation on vowel targets of ten French oral vowels /i, e, ɛ, a, u, o, ɔ, y, ø, œ/ were examined. The average vowel formant frequencies F1, F2, F3 and F4 in symmetrical sequences CVCVCVC to formant values of the same vowels in isolation were compared. The results show t...

This acoustic-perceptual study concerns the limits of perception and production of French oral vowels [i, e, ɛ, a, u, o, ɔ, y, ø, œ], in isolation and in different consonantal contexts, in ten pre-service Czech teachers of French as a Foreign Language (FFL). The results show that (1) Phonetic proficiency in vowels depends on their spellings and con...

Paris (2) PLIDAM, INALCO, 75013 Paris (3) Linguistique Anglaise, Psycholinguistique (EA1569), Université Paris 8, 93526 Saint-Denis Cette étude s'intéresse à l'analyse formantique des 10 voyelles orales du français : /i e ɛ a ɔ o u y ø oe/, prononcées en contexte isolé par 40 locuteurs natifs dans une phrase cadre. Le but de ce travail est de mettr...