McCarthy, KM;
Skoruppa, K;
Iverson, P;
(2019)
Development of neural perceptual vowel spaces during the first year of life.
Scientific Reports
, 9
(1)
, Article 19592. 10.1038/s41598-019-55085-y.
Preview |
Text
Development of neural perceptual vowel spaces during the first year of life.pdf - Published Version Download (1MB) | Preview |
Abstract
This study measured infants' neural responses for spectral changes between all pairs of a set of English vowels. In contrast to previous methods that only allow for the assessment of a few phonetic contrasts, we present a new method that allows us to assess changes in spectral sensitivity across the entire vowel space and create two-dimensional perceptual maps of the infants' vowel development. Infants aged four to eleven months were played long series of concatenated vowels, and the neural response to each vowel change was assessed using the Acoustic Change Complex (ACC) from EEG recordings. The results demonstrated that the youngest infants' responses more closely reflected the acoustic differences between the vowel pairs and reflected higher weight to first-formant variation. Older infants had less acoustically driven responses that seemed a result of selective increases in sensitivity for phonetically similar vowels. The results suggest that phonetic development may involve a perceptual warping for confusable vowels rather than uniform learning, as well as an overall increasing sensitivity to higher-frequency acoustic information.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Development of neural perceptual vowel spaces during the first year of life. |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-019-55085-y |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-55085-y |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10090734 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
