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Josiane Bertoncini

Bio: Josiane Bertoncini is an academic researcher from Paris Descartes University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Speech perception & Vowel. The author has an hindex of 26, co-authored 46 publications receiving 4582 citations. Previous affiliations of Josiane Bertoncini include Centre national de la recherche scientifique & University of Paris.

Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Four-day-old French and 2-month-old American infants distinguish utterances in their native languages from those of another language, and two experiments with low-pass-filtered versions of the samples replicated the main findings of discrimination of the native language utterances.

1,268 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article investigated the ability of French newborns to discriminate between sets of sentences in different foreign languages and found that infants use prosodic and, more specifically, rhythmic information to classify utterances into broad language classes defined according to global rhythmic properties.
Abstract: Three experiments investigated the ability of French newborns to discriminate between sets of sentences in different foreign languages. The sentences were low-pass filtered to reduce segmental information while sparing prosodic information. Infants discriminated between stress-timed English and mora-timed Japanese (Experiment 1) but failed to discriminate between stress-timed English and stress-timed Dutch (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, infants heard different combinations of sentences from English, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. Discrimination was observed only when English and Dutch sentences were contrasted with Spanish and Italian sentences. These results suggest that newborns use prosodic and, more specifically, rhythmic information to classify utterances into broad language classes defined according to global rhythmic properties. Implications of this for the acquisition of the rhythmic properties of the native language are discussed.

677 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper showed that infants discriminate 2- vs 3-CV syllables and 4- vs 6-phoneme bisyllabic utterances using the high-amplitude sucking procedure.
Abstract: Three experiments, using the high-amplitude sucking procedure, tested whether 4-day-old infants discriminate multisyllabic utterances on the basis of number of syllables or number of phonemes Experiment 1 showed that infants discriminate 2 large sets of phonetically variable utterances composed of 2- vs 3-CV (consonant-vowel) syllables Experiment 2 was run to assess whether infants discriminated the 2 sets on the basis of duration differences between the 2- and 3-CV stimuli Results indicate that reducing the duration differences does not affect infants'discrimination Finally, Experiment 3 investigated whether infants discriminate 4- vs 6-phoneme bisyllabic utterances The results provide no evidence that infants are sensitive to such a change in number of phonemic constituents

264 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It was shown that infants will suck more for their mother's voices under the intonated condition only, and it was concluded that a young infant prefers its own mother's voice provided the mother speaks normally.
Abstract: Each of a group of one-month-old infants was reinforced, contingent upon nonnutritive sucking, with its mother's voice and the voice of a stranger. In this experiment, two conditions were applied. Under the first, the mother's speech was aimed at communicating with the infant, while, under the second, the mother's speech lacked prosodic and intonational aspects of normal speech. It was shown that infants will suck more for their mother's voices under the intonated condition only. It was concluded that a young infant prefers its own mother's voice provided the mother speaks normally.

263 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Three-day-old infants were tested with a non-nutritive sucking paradigm, and the results of two experiments suggest that infants can discriminate between items that contain a word boundary and items that do not, lending plausibility to the hypothesis that infants might use word boundary cues during lexical acquisition.
Abstract: Babies, like adults, hear mostly continuous speech. Unlike adults, however, they are not acquainted with the words that constitute the utterances; yet in order to construct representations for words, they have to retrieve them from the speech wave. Given the apparent lack of obvious cues to word boundaries (such as pauses between words), this is not a trivial problem. Among the several mechanisms that could be explored to solve this bootstrapping problem for lexical acquisition, a tentative but reasonable one posits the existence of some cues (other than silence) that signal word boundaries. In order to test this hypothesis, infants were used as informants in our experiments. It was hypothesized that if word boundary cues exist, and if infants are to use them in the course of language acquisition, then they should at least perceive these cues. As a consequence, infants should be able to discriminate sequences that contain a word boundary from those that do not. A number of bisyllabic stimuli were extracte...

224 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI
13 Dec 1996-Science
TL;DR: The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds.
Abstract: Learners rely on a combination of experience-independent and experience-dependent mechanisms to extract information from the environment. Language acquisition involves both types of mechanisms, but most theorists emphasize the relative importance of experience-independent mechanisms. The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds. Moreover, this word segmentation was based on statistical learning from only 2 minutes of exposure, suggesting that infants have access to a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical properties of the language input.

4,352 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
31 Jan 1992-Science
TL;DR: This study of 6-month-old infants from two countries, the United States and Sweden, shows that exposure to a specific language in the first half year of life alters infants' phonetic perception.
Abstract: Linguistic experience affects phonetic perception. However, the critical period during which experience affects perception and the mechanism responsible for these effects are unknown. This study of 6-month-old infants from two countries, the United States and Sweden, shows that exposure to a specific language in the first half year of life alters infants' phonetic perception.

1,862 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
06 Jun 1980-Science
TL;DR: The neonate's preference for the maternal voice suggests that the period shortly after birth may be important for initiating infant bonding to the mother.
Abstract: By sucking on a nonnutritive nipple in different ways, a newborn human could produce either its mother's voice or the voice of another female. Infants learned how to produce the mother's voice and produced it more often than the other voice. The neonate's preference for the maternal voice suggests that the period shortly after birth may be important for initiating infant bonding to the mother.

1,852 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Human speech and birdsong have numerous parallels, with striking similarities in how sensory experience is internalized and used to shape vocal outputs, and how learning is enhanced during a critical period of development.
Abstract: Human speech and birdsong have numerous parallels. Both humans and songbirds learn their complex vocalizations early in life, exhibiting a strong dependence on hearing the adults they will imitate, as well as themselves as they practice, and a waning of this dependence as they mature. Innate predispositions for perceiving and learning the correct sounds exist in both groups, although more evidence of innate descriptions of species-specific signals exists in songbirds, where numerous species of vocal learners have been compared. Humans also share with songbirds an early phase of learning that is primarily perceptual, which then serves to guide later vocal production. Both humans and songbirds have evolved a complex hierarchy of specialized forebrain areas in which motor and auditory centers interact closely, and which control the lower vocal motor areas also found in nonlearners. In both these vocal learners, however, how auditory feedback of self is processed in these brain areas is surprisingly unclear. Finally, humans and songbirds have similar critical periods for vocal learning, with a much greater ability to learn early in life. In both groups, the capacity for late vocal learning may be decreased by the act of learning itself, as well as by biological factors such as the hormones of puberty. Although some features of birdsong and speech are clearly not analogous, such as the capacity of language for meaning, abstraction, and flexible associations, there are striking similarities in how sensory experience is internalized and used to shape vocal outputs, and how learning is enhanced during a critical period of development. Similar neural mechanisms may therefore be involved.

1,519 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the emergence and development of active "self-and-other" awareness in infancy is examined and the importance of its motives and emotions to mental health practice with children.
Abstract: We review research evidence on the emergence and development of active "self-and-other" awareness in infancy, and examine the importance of its motives and emotions to mental health practice with children. This relates to how communication begins and develops in infancy, how it influences the individual subject's movement, perception, and learning, and how the infant's biologically grounded self-regulation of internal state and self-conscious purposefulness is sustained through active engagement with sympathetic others. Mutual self-other-consciousness is found to play the lead role in developing a child's cooperative intelligence for cultural learning and language. A variety of preconceptions have animated rival research traditions investigating infant communication and cognition. We distinguish the concept of "intersubjectivity", and outline the history of its use in developmental research. The transforming body and brain of a human individual grows in active engagement with an environment of human factors--organic at first, then psychological or inter-mental. Adaptive, human-responsive processes are generated first by interneuronal activity within the developing brain as formation of the human embryo is regulated in a support-system of maternal tissues. Neural structures are further elaborated with the benefit of intra-uterine stimuli in the foetus, then supported in the rapidly growing forebrain and cerebellum of the young child by experience of the intuitive responses of parents and other human companions. We focus particularly on intrinsic patterns and processes in pre-natal and post-natal brain maturation that anticipate psychosocial support in infancy. The operation of an intrinsic motive formation (IMF) that developed in the core of the brain before birth is evident in the tightly integrated intermodal sensory-motor coordination of a newborn infant's orienting to stimuli and preferential learning of human signals, by the temporal coherence and intrinsic rhythms of infant behaviour, especially in communication, and neonates' extraordinary capacities for reactive and evocative imitation. The correct functioning of this integrated neural motivating system is found to be essential to the development of both the infant's purposeful consciousness and his or her ability to cooperate with other persons' actions and interests, and to learn from them. The relevance of infants' inherent intersubjectivity to major child mental health issues is highlighted by examining selected areas of clinical concern. We review recent findings on postnatal depression, prematurity, autism, ADHD, specific language impairments, and central auditory processing deficits, and comment on the efficacy of interventions that aim to support intrinsic motives for intersubjective communication when these are not developing normally.

1,355 citations