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Browsing by Author "Shuang, Lu"

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  • Infants' perception of native and non-native pitch contrasts
    Publication . Frota, Sónia; Butler, Joseph; Shuang, Lu; Vigário, Marina
    Infants' ability to distinguish between forms of phonetic variation in speech that are relevant to meaning is essential for their language development. Little is known about the developmental course of infants' perception of pitch contrasts, particularly in the presence of segmental variability which entails the ability to extract and generalize the contrastive patterns. Using single-bisyllabic utterances, in Experiment 1 we examined native discrimination of the statement (falling)/yes-no question (falling-rising) intonation contrast by European Portuguese (EP)-learning infants, and demonstrated that both 5-6 and 8-9 month-old infants were able to discriminate the contrast. Experiment 2 addressed the question whether the contrast between falling vs. falling-rising contours would also be perceived in segmentally varied non-native input. EP-learning infants' perception of the lexical distinction between Mandarin Chinese Tone 1+Tone 4 and Tone 1+Tone 2, with overall similar contour shapes but different implementation of the falling/rising patterns throughout the segmental string, was examined. Infants failed to discriminate the non-native pitch contrast, both at 5-6 months and 8-9 months, suggesting that language-specific perception for pitch, and for the tone/intonation distinction, emerges as early as 5 months of age.
    2016Conference object Open access Show more
  • Revisiting “Stress Deafness” in European Portuguese – An ERP Study
    Publication . Shuang, Lu; Correia, Susana; Jernónimo, Rita; Vigário, Marina; Frota, Sónia
    Several behavioral studies have suggested that speakers of languages with variable stress (e.g., Spanish) are better than speakers of languages with fixed stress (e.g., French) at discriminating stress contrasts. European Portuguese (EP) is a language with variable stress, and the main cues for stress are duration and vowel reduction. However, when the vowel quality cue is absent, native speakers are not able to behaviorally discriminate nonsense words that differ only in stress pattern. Using a passive oddball paradigm, the present study recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether native speakers of EP can unintentionally discriminate CVCV pseudo-words with trochaic and iambic stress patterns in the absence of vowel reduction. The results showed that both the trochaic and iambic conditions yielded mismatch negativity (MMN) and late negativity. Moreover, the components in the iambic condition span over a larger temporal window than in the trochaic condition. These results suggest that native speakers of EP can discriminate stress patterns without vowel quality cues at the unintentional level. Furthermore, they are more sensitive to the iambic stress pattern than the trochaic one, which is at odds with their relative frequency in the language, but matches recent developmental findings in the acquisition of stress.
    2016Conference object Open access Show more