Jean-Rémy Hochmann

Bio: Jean-Rémy Hochmann is an academic researcher from Centre national de la recherche scientifique. The author has contributed to research in topics: Perception & Language acquisition. The author has an hindex of 13, co-authored 23 publications receiving 503 citations. Previous affiliations of Jean-Rémy Hochmann include Harvard University & University of Lyon.

Consonants and vowels: different roles in early language acquisition.

Abstract: Language acquisition involves both acquiring a set of words (i.e. the lexicon) and learning the rules that combine them to form sentences (i.e. syntax). Here, we show that consonants are mainly involved in word processing, whereas vowels are favored for extracting and generalizing structural relations. We demonstrate that such a division of labor between consonants and vowels plays a role in language acquisition. In two very similar experimental paradigms, we show that 12-month-old infants rely more on the consonantal tier when identifying words (Experiment 1), but are better at extracting and generalizing repetition-based srtuctures over the vocalic tier (Experiment 2). These results indicate that infants are able to exploit the functional differences between consonants and vowels at an age when they start acquiring the lexicon, and suggest that basic speech categories are assigned to different learning mechanisms that sustain early language acquisition.

Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories

Abstract: Recent research has shown that specific areas of the human brain are activated by speech from the time of birth. However, it is currently unknown whether newborns' brains also encode and remember the sounds of words when processing speech. The present study investigates the type of information that newborns retain when they hear words and the brain structures that support word-sound recognition. Forty-four healthy newborns were tested with the functional near-infrared spectroscopy method to establish their ability to memorize the sound of a word and distinguish it from a phonetically similar one, 2 min after encoding. Right frontal regions—comparable to those activated in adults during retrieval of verbal material—showed a characteristic neural signature of recognition when newborns listened to a test word that had the same vowel of a previously heard word. In contrast, a characteristic novelty response was found when a test word had different vowels than the familiar word, despite having the same consonants. These results indicate that the information carried by vowels is better recognized by newborns than the information carried by consonants. Moreover, these data suggest that right frontal areas may support the recognition of speech sequences from the very first stages of language acquisition.

The Invariance Problem in Infancy A Pupillometry Study

Abstract: Despite the fact that no invariant acoustic property corresponds to a single stop consonant coupled with different vowels (e.g., [da], [de], and [du]), adults effortlessly identify the same consonant embedded in different syllables. In so doing, they solve the invariance problem. Can 3- and 6-month-olds solve it as well? To answer this question, we developed a novel methodology based on pupillometry. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated for the first time that infants are sensitive to the distinction between frequent and infrequent acoustic stimuli, showing greater pupil dilation in response to infrequent stimuli. Building on this effect, in Experiment 2, we showed that 6-month-olds, but not 3-month-olds, solve the invariance problem. Moreover, this ability develops before, and therefore independently of, the ability to produce well-formed syllables.

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

Abstract: Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Statistical Parametric Mapping The Analysis Of Functional Brain Images

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Speech perception and language acquisition in the first year of life.

Abstract: During the first year of life, infants pass important milestones in language development. We review some of the experimental evidence concerning these milestones in the domains of speech perception, phonological development, word learning, morphosyntactic acquisition, and bilingualism, emphasizing their interactions. We discuss them in the context of their biological underpinnings, introducing the most recent advances not only in language development, but also in neighboring areas such as genetics and the comparative research on animal communication systems. We argue for a theory of language acquisition that integrates behavioral, cognitive, neural, and evolutionary considerations and proposes to unify previously opposing theoretical stances, such as statistical learning, rule-based nativist accounts, and perceptual learning theories.