Infants struggle to apply earlier-demonstrated sound-discrimination abilities to later word learning, attending to non-constrastive acoustic dimensions (e.g., Hay et al., 2015), and not always to contrastive dimensions (e.g., Stager & Werker, 1997). One hint about the nature of infants' difficulties comes from the observation that input from multiple talkers can improve word learning (Rost & McMurray, 2009). This may be because, when a single talker says both of the to-be-learned words, consistent talker's-voice characteristics make the acoustics of the two words more overlapping (Apfelbaum & McMurray, 2011). Here, we test that notion. We taught 14-month-old infants two similar-sounding words in the Switch habituation paradigm. The same amount of overall talker variability was present as in prior multiple-talker experiments, but male and female talkers said different words, creating a gender-word correlation. Under an acoustic-similarity account, correlated talker gender should help to separate words acoustically and facilitate learning. Instead, we found that correlated talker gender impaired learning of word-object pairings compared with uncorrelated talker gender-even when gender-word pairings were always maintained in test-casting doubt on one account of the beneficial effects of talker variability. We discuss several alternate potential explanations for this effect.
The primary goal of this work is to examine prosodic structure as expressed concurrently through articulatory and manual gestures. Specifically, we investigated the effects of phrase-level prominence (Experiment 1) and of prosodic boundaries (Experiments 2 and 3) on the kinematic properties of oral constriction and manual gestures. The hypothesis guiding this work is that prosodic structure will be similarly expressed in both modalities. To test this, we have developed a novel method of data collection that simultaneously records speech audio, vocal tract gestures (using electromagnetic articulometry) and manual gestures (using motion capture). This method allows us, for the first time, to investigate kinematic properties of body movement and vocal tract gestures simultaneously, which in turn allows us to examine the relationship between speech and body gestures with great precision. A second goal of the paper is thus to establish the validity of this method. Results from two speakers show that manual and oral gestures lengthen under prominence and at prosodic boundaries, indicating that the effects of prosodic structure extend beyond the vocal tract to include body movement.
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