Noun and Verb Lexicons Differentially Predict Later Grammatical Development in Mandarin-Speaking Children With and Without Late Language Emergence.

PURPOSE: The current investigation evaluated the extent to which early noun, verb, and adjective lexicon sizes predicted later grammatical outcomes in Mandarin-speaking children with and without late language emergence (LLE) using a parent report. METHOD: In Study 1, the parents of 24 Mandarin-speaking children with typical language filled out the toddler version of Mandarin-Chinese Communicative Development Inventory-Taiwan (MCDI-T) when these children were 24 and 36 months old. In Study 2, the parents of 23 children with LLE completed the same form when these children were 24, 36, and 48 months old. Noun, verb, and adjective lexicon sizes and grammatical complexity scores were computed from the MCDI-T form for each child. RESULTS: Study 1 showed that verb lexicon size, but not noun or adjective lexicon size, at 24 months predicted grammatical complexity scores at 36 months for children with typical language. Study 2 revealed that noun lexicon size, but not verb or adjective lexicon size, at 24 months predicted grammatical complexity scores at 36 months for children with LLE. Noun lexicon size at 36 months was also the only significant predictor for grammatical complexity scores at 48 months in children with LLE. CONCLUSIONS: Noun and verb lexicon size differentially predicted later grammatical outcomes in young Mandarin-speaking children with and without LLE. The finding suggested that children with LLE may have approached grammatical learning differently from their typical peers due to the small verb lexicon size in the early phase of language development.

Effects of parents' voice on reducing heel puncture pain in high-risk newborns: A randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: High-risk newborns, such as premature or severely ill infants, often experience painful treatments and separation from their parents. While previous studies have focused on the positive impacts of a mother's voice on newborns' physiology and pain response, research on the father's voice and vocal acoustics in high-risk newborns is limited. AIM: To examine whether parents' voices reduce heel puncture pain in high-risk newborns and the relationship between parents' vocal acoustics, physiological parameters and pain response. STUDY DESIGN: A randomized controlled clinical trial was conducted with 105 high-risk newborn-parent dyads. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups: recorded mother's voice, recorded father's voice or control group without any recorded voice. Outcome measures included heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation and pain response assessed using the Neonatal Infant Pain Scale. Data analysis utilized generalized estimation equations, and parents' vocal acoustics were analysed using Praat voice credit software. RESULTS: The mother's voice group exhibited significantly lower heart rates at 1, 5 and 10 min after the procedure, along with lower respiratory rates and pain levels at 5 and 10 min after the procedure compared with the control group. Similarly, the father's voice group demonstrated significantly lower heart rates at 1 and 5 min after the procedure, decreased respiratory rates at 5 and 10 min after the procedure and reduced pain levels at 1 and 5 to 10 min after the procedure compared with the control group. Higher minimum and mean pitches in parents' voices correlated with slower heart rates, while slower parental speech was associated with reduced newborn pain. CONCLUSION: Both maternal and paternal vocal interventions alleviated pain during heel puncture procedures among high-risk newborns. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: The noninvasive intervention serves as a reference for parental participation in care. Nurses can help parents to intervene with the acoustic characteristics that alleviate pain among high-risk newborns.

The mismatch negativity to abstract relationship of tone pairs is independent of attention.

The mismatch negativity (MMN) implicating a comparison process between the deviant and the memory trace of the standard can be elicited by not only changes in physical features but also violations of abstract patterns. It is considered pre-attentive, yet the use of the passive design makes it difficult to exclude the possibility of attention leak. In contrast to how this issue has been well addressed with the MMN to physical changes, much less research directly investigated the attentional effect on the MMN to abstract relationships. Here we conducted an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment to study whether and how the MMN to abstract relationships is modulated by attention. We adapted the oddball paradigm of Kujala et al. by presenting occasional descending tone pairs among frequent ascending tone pairs, while additionally implementing a novel control of attention. Participants' attention was either directed away from the sounds (with an engaging task of visual target detection, so that the sounds were task-irrelevant) or toward the sounds (with a conventional task of auditory deviant detection, so that the sounds were task-relevant). The MMN to abstract relationships appeared regardless of attention, confirming the pre-attentive assumption. The attention-independence of the frontocentral and supratemporal components of the MMN supported the notion that attention is not required to generate the MMN. At the individual level, a relatively equal number of participants showed attention enhancement and attention suppression. It is unlike the attentional modulation on the P3b, which was robustly elicited in the attended condition only. The concurrent collection of these two neurophysiological markers in both unattended and attended conditions might be potentially suitable for testing clinical populations showing heterogeneous deficits in auditory function independent/dependent of attention.

Speech sound errors of Mandarin-speaking preschool children with co-occurring speech sound disorder and developmental language disorder.

This study examined the occurrence and types of speech sound errors in Mandarin-speaking children and compared those with co-occurring developmental language disorder (DLD) and speech sound disorders (SSDs) to those with SSD only and those with no DLD or SSD. The participants were 64 four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children, including 20 age-matched children with co-occurring SSD and LI (SSD + DLD), 20 with SSD only, and 24 with no DLD or SSD (typical development [TD]). Speech samples from a list of 20 pictures of common objects and animals were elicited in a picture-naming task. One speech-language therapist transcribed and analysed consonant production accuracy and coded speech errors into the types of substitution, omission, distortion, and addition and phonological processes into typical and atypical sound changes. The interrater reliability of consonant production analysis was checked by another experienced speech-language pathologist. Children with co-occurring SSD and DLD demonstrated the least accuracy of speech production among the three groups of children. Children with co-occurring SSD and DLD showed more frequent use of substitutions, omissions, typical sound changes (i.e. stopping of affricates, stopping of fricatives, deaspiration), and atypical sound changes (i.e. initial consonant deletion, fronting, affrication of stops) than children with SSD only, while no significant difference between the SSD and TD groups was observed in omission error types and atypical sound changes. These results suggest that the disorders in speech sound production in children with SSD and DLD may be associated with underlying phonological-linguistic processing.

Discrimination and identification of lexical tones and consonants in Mandarin-speaking children using cochlear implants.

Mandarin-speaking adults using cochlear implants (CI) experience more difficulties in perceiving lexical tones than consonants. This problem may result from the fact that CIs provide relatively sufficient temporal envelope information for consonant perception in quiet environments, but do not convey the fine spectro-temporal information considered to be necessary for accurate pitch perception. Another possibility is that Mandarin speakers with post-lingual hearing loss have developed language-specific use of these acoustic cues, impeding lexical tone processing under CI conditions. To investigate this latter hypothesis, syllable discrimination and word identification abilities for Mandarin consonants (place and manner) and lexical-tone contrasts (tones 1 vs 3 and 1 vs 2) were measured in 15 Mandarin-speaking children using CIs and age-matched children with normal hearing (NH). In the discrimination task, only children using CIs exhibited significantly lower scores for consonant place contrasts compared to other contrasts, including lexical tones. In the word identification task, children using CIs showed lower performance for all contrasts compared to children with NH, but they both showed specific difficulties with tone 1 vs 2 contrasts. This study suggests that Mandarin-speaking children using CIs are able to discriminate and identify lexical tones and, perhaps more surprisingly, have more difficulties when discriminating consonants.

Speech Perception Deficits in Mandarin-Speaking School-Aged Children with Poor Reading Comprehension.

Previous studies have shown that children learning alphabetic writing systems who have language impairment or dyslexia exhibit speech perception deficits. However, whether such deficits exist in children learning logographic writing systems who have poor reading comprehension remains uncertain. To further explore this issue, the present study examined speech perception deficits in Mandarin-speaking children with poor reading comprehension. Two self-designed tasks, consonant categorical perception task and lexical tone discrimination task were used to compare speech perception performance in children (n = 31, age range = 7;4-10;2) with poor reading comprehension and an age-matched typically developing group (n = 31, age range = 7;7-9;10). Results showed that the children with poor reading comprehension were less accurate in consonant and lexical tone discrimination tasks and perceived speech contrasts less categorically than the matched group. The correlations between speech perception skills (i.e., consonant and lexical tone discrimination sensitivities and slope of consonant identification curve) and individuals' oral language and reading comprehension were stronger than the correlations between speech perception ability and word recognition ability. In conclusion, the results revealed that Mandarin-speaking children with poor reading comprehension exhibit less-categorized speech perception, suggesting that imprecise speech perception, especially lexical tone perception, is essential to account for reading learning difficulties in Mandarin-speaking children.

Developmental changes in brain response to speech perception in late-talking children: A longitudinal MMR study.

This study used a longitudinal design to examine the development of mismatch responses (MMRs) to Mandarin lexical tones, an index of neural speech discriminative responses, in late talkers and typical controls at 3, 5, and 6 years of age. Lexical tones are phonetic suprasegments that distinguish the lexical meanings of syllables in tonal languages. The 2 year-old late talkers were later divided into persistent language delay and late bloomer groups according to their performance on standardized language tests at 4 years. Results showed that children with persistent language delay demonstrated more positive mismatch responses than the typical controls at 3 years of age. At the age of 5, no group difference were found in the amplitude of MMRs, but the maturation of MMRs could be observed in the change of topography, with more prominent negative response in the frontal sites only in the typical group. Correlations were found between the index of MMRs at 3 years and children's language performance outcome at 6 years. Our results indicate that the development of fine-grained tone representations is delayed in late-talking children between 3 and 5 years and may be one of the underlying mechanisms which associated with later language performance.

The perception of speech modulation cues in lexical tones is guided by early language-specific experience.

A number of studies showed that infants reorganize their perception of speech sounds according to their native language categories during their first year of life. Still, information is lacking about the contribution of basic auditory mechanisms to this process. This study aimed to evaluate when native language experience starts to noticeably affect the perceptual processing of basic acoustic cues [i.e., frequency-modulation (FM) and amplitude-modulation information] known to be crucial for speech perception in adults. The discrimination of a lexical-tone contrast (rising versus low) was assessed in 6- and 10-month-old infants learning either French or Mandarin using a visual habituation paradigm. The lexical tones were presented in two conditions designed to either keep intact or to severely degrade the FM and fine spectral cues needed to accurately perceive voice-pitch trajectory. A third condition was designed to assess the discrimination of the same voice-pitch trajectories using click trains containing only the FM cues related to the fundamental-frequency (F0) in French- and Mandarin-learning 10-month-old infants. Results showed that the younger infants of both language groups and the Mandarin-learning 10-month-olds discriminated the intact lexical-tone contrast while French-learning 10-month-olds failed. However, only the French 10-month-olds discriminated degraded lexical tones when FM, and thus voice-pitch cues were reduced. Moreover, Mandarin-learning 10-month-olds were found to discriminate the pitch trajectories as presented in click trains better than French infants. Altogether, these results reveal that the perceptual reorganization occurring during the first year of life for lexical tones is coupled with changes in the auditory ability to use speech modulation cues.

Developmental changes in mismatch responses to mandarin consonants and lexical tones from early to middle childhood.

The purpose of this study was to use mismatch responses (MMRs) to explore the dynamic changes of Mandarin speech perception abilities from early to middle childhood. Twenty preschoolers, 18 school-aged children, and 26 adults participated in this study. Two sets of synthesized speech stimuli varying in Mandarin consonant (alveolo-palatal affricate vs. fricative) and lexical tone features (rising vs. contour tone) were used to examine the developmental course of speech perception abilities. The results indicated that only the adult group demonstrated typical early mismatch negativity (MMN) responses, suggesting that the ability to discriminate specific speech cues in Mandarin consonant and lexical tone is a continuing process in preschool- and school-aged children. Additionally, distinct MMR patterns provided evidence indicating diverse developmental courses to different speech characteristics. By incorporating data from the two speech conditions, we propose using MMR profiles consisting of mismatch negativity (MMN), positive mismatch response (p-MMR), and late discriminative negativity (LDN) as possible brain indices to investigate speech perception development.

Novel-word learning deficits in Mandarin-speaking preschool children with specific language impairments.

Children with SLI exhibit overall deficits in novel word learning compared to their age-matched peers. However, the manifestation of the word learning difficulty in SLI was not consistent across tasks and the factors affecting the learning performance were not yet determined. Our aim is to examine the extent of word learning difficulties in Mandarin-speaking preschool children with SLI, and to explore the potent influence of existing lexical knowledge on to the word learning process. Preschool children with SLI (n=37) and typical language development (n=33) were exposed to novel words for unfamiliar objects embedded in stories. Word learning tasks including the initial mapping and short-term repetitive learning were designed. Results revealed that Mandarin-speaking preschool children with SLI performed as well as their age-peers in the initial form-meaning mapping task. Their word learning difficulty was only evidently shown in the short-term repetitive learning task under a production demand, and their learning speed was slower than the control group. Children with SLI learned the novel words with a semantic head better in both the initial mapping and repetitive learning tasks. Moderate correlations between stand word learning performances and scores on standardized vocabulary were found after controlling for children's age and nonverbal IQ. The results suggested that the word learning difficulty in children with SLI occurred in the process of establishing a robust phonological representation at the beginning stage of word learning. Also, implicit compound knowledge is applied to aid word learning process for children with and without SLI. We also provide the empirical data to validate the relationship between preschool children's word learning performance and their existing receptive vocabulary ability.

Linking brain-wide multivoxel activation patterns to behaviour: Examples from language and math.

A key goal of cognitive neuroscience is to find simple and direct connections between brain and behaviour. However, fMRI analysis typically involves choices between many possible options, with each choice potentially biasing any brain-behaviour correlations that emerge. Standard methods of fMRI analysis assess each voxel individually, but then face the problem of selection bias when combining those voxels into a region-of-interest, or ROI. Multivariate pattern-based fMRI analysis methods use classifiers to analyse multiple voxels together, but can also introduce selection bias via data-reduction steps as feature selection of voxels, pre-selecting activated regions, or principal components analysis. We show here that strong brain-behaviour links can be revealed without any voxel selection or data reduction, using just plain linear regression as a classifier applied to the whole brain at once, i.e. treating each entire brain volume as a single multi-voxel pattern. The brain-behaviour correlations emerged despite the fact that the classifier was not provided with any information at all about subjects' behaviour, but instead was given only the neural data and its condition-labels. Surprisingly, more powerful classifiers such as a linear SVM and regularised logistic regression produce very similar results. We discuss some possible reasons why the very simple brain-wide linear regression model is able to find correlations with behaviour that are as strong as those obtained on the one hand from a specific ROI and on the other hand from more complex classifiers. In a manner which is unencumbered by arbitrary choices, our approach offers a method for investigating connections between brain and behaviour which is simple, rigorous and direct.

Quantifying the adequacy of neural representations for a cross-language phonetic discrimination task: prediction of individual differences.

In order for stimuli to be perceptually discriminable, their representations in the brain must be distinct. Investigating the task of discriminating the syllables /ra/ and /la/, we hypothesized that the more distinct a person's neural representations of those sounds were, the better their behavioral ability to discriminate them would be. Standard neuroimaging approaches are ill-suited to testing this hypothesis as they have problems differentiating between neural representations spatially intermingled within the same brain area. We therefore performed multi-voxel pattern-based analysis of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity elicited by these syllables, in native speakers of English and Japanese. In right primary auditory cortex, the statistical separability of these fMRI patterns predicted subjects' behavioral ability to tell the sounds apart, not only across groups but also across individuals. This opens up a new approach for identifying neural representations and for quantifying their task suitability.

Age-related changes in acoustic modifications of Mandarin maternal speech to preverbal infants and five-year-old children: a longitudinal study.

ABSTRACTAcoustic-phonetic exaggeration of infant-directed speech (IDS) is well documented, but few studies address whether these features are modified with a child's age. Mandarin-speaking mothers were recorded while addressing an adult and their child at two ages (0 ; 7-1 ; 0 and 5 ; 0) to examine the acoustic-phonetic differences between IDS and child-directed speech (CDS). CDS exhibits an exaggeration pattern resembling that of IDS - expanded vowel space, longer vowels, higher pitch and greater lexical tone differences - when compared to ADS. Longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the extent of acoustic exaggeration is significantly smaller in CDS than in IDS. Age-related changes in maternal speech provide some support for the hypothesis that mothers adjust their speech directed toward children as a function of the child's language ability.

Acoustic analysis of lexical tone in Mandarin infant-directed speech.

Using Mandarin Chinese, a "tone language" in which the pitch contours of syllables differentiate words, the authors examined the acoustic modifications of infant-directed speech (IDS) at the syllable level to test 2 hypotheses: (a) the overall increase in pitch and intonation contour that occurs in IDS at the phrase level would not distort lexical pitch at the syllable level and (b) IDS provides exaggerates cues to lexical tones. Sixteen Mandarin-speaking mothers were recorded while addressing their infants and addressing an adult. The results indicate that IDS does not distort the acoustic cues that are essential to word meaning at the syllable level; evidence of exaggeration of the acoustic differences in IDS was observed, extending previous findings of phonetic exaggeration to the lexical level.

Perception of native and non-native affricate-fricative contrasts: cross-language tests on adults and infants.

Previous studies have shown improved sensitivity to native-language contrasts and reduced sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrasts when comparing 6-8 and 10-12-month-old infants. This developmental pattern is interpreted as reflecting the onset of language-specific processing around the first birthday. However, generalization of this finding is limited by the fact that studies have yielded inconsistent results and that insufficient numbers of phonetic contrasts have been tested developmentally; this is especially true for native-language phonetic contrasts. Three experiments assessed the effects of language experience on affricate-fricative contrasts in a cross-language study of English and Mandarin adults and infants. Experiment 1 showed that English-speaking adults score lower than Mandarin-speaking adults on Mandarin alveolo-palatal affricate-fricative discrimination. Experiment 2 examined developmental change in the discrimination of this contrast in English- and Mandarin-leaning infants between 6 and 12 months of age. The results demonstrated that native-language performance significantly improved with age while performance on the non-native contrast decreased. Experiment 3 replicated the perceptual improvement for a native contrast: 6-8 and 10-12-month-old English-learning infants showed a performance increase at the older age. The results add to our knowledge of the developmental patterns of native and non-native phonetic perception.

The effect of reduced vowel working space on speech intelligibility in Mandarin-speaking young adults with cerebral palsy.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of reduced vowel working space on dysarthric talkers' speech intelligibility using both acoustic and perceptual approaches. In experiment 1, the acoustic-perceptual relationship between vowel working space area and speech intelligibility was examined in Mandarin-speaking young adults with cerebral palsy. Subjects read aloud 18 bisyllabic words containing the vowels /i/, /a/, and /u/ using their normal speaking rate. Each talker's words were identified by three normal listeners. The percentage of correct vowel and word identification were calculated as vowel intelligibility and word intelligibility, respectively. Results revealed that talkers with cerebral palsy exhibited smaller vowel working space areas compared to ten age-matched controls. The vowel working space area was significantly correlated with vowel intelligibility (r=0.632, p<0.005) and with word intelligibility (r=0.684, p<0.005). Experiment 2 examined whether tokens of expanded vowel working spaces were perceived as better vowel exemplars and represented with greater perceptual spaces than tokens of reduced vowel working spaces. The results of the perceptual experiment support this prediction. The distorted vowels of talkers with cerebral palsy compose a smaller acoustic space that results in shrunken intervowel perceptual distances for listeners.

Speech perception in infancy predicts language development in the second year of life: a longitudinal study.

Infants' early phonetic perception is hypothesized to play an important role in language development. Previous studies have not assessed this potential link in the first 2 years of life. In this study, speech discrimination was measured in 6-month-old infants using a conditioned head-turn task. At 13, 16, and 24 months of age, language development was assessed in these same children using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. Results demonstrated significant correlations between speech perception at 6 months of age and later language (word understanding, word production, phrase understanding). The finding that speech perception performance at 6 months predicts language at 2 years supports the idea that phonetic perception may play an important role in language acquisition.

Foreign-language experience in infancy: effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning.

Infants acquire language with remarkable speed, although little is known about the mechanisms that underlie the acquisition process. Studies of the phonetic units of language have shown that early in life, infants are capable of discerning differences among the phonetic units of all languages, including native- and foreign-language sounds. Between 6 and 12 mo of age, the ability to discriminate foreign-language phonetic units sharply declines. In two studies, we investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions for reversing this decline in foreign-language phonetic perception. In Experiment 1, 9-mo-old American infants were exposed to native Mandarin Chinese speakers in 12 laboratory sessions. A control group also participated in 12 language sessions but heard only English. Subsequent tests of Mandarin speech perception demonstrated that exposure to Mandarin reversed the decline seen in the English control group. In Experiment 2, infants were exposed to the same foreign-language speakers and materials via audiovisual or audio-only recordings. The results demonstrated that exposure to recorded Mandarin, without interpersonal interaction, had no effect. Between 9 and 10 mo of age, infants show phonetic learning from live, but not prerecorded, exposure to a foreign language, suggesting a learning process that does not require long-term listening and is enhanced by social interaction.