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1. Mask-wearing affects infants' selective attention to familiar and unfamiliar audiovisual speech

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2025.1442305  

   Slivka, Lauren N; Clayton, Kenna_R H; Reynolds, Greg D (February 2025, Frontiers in Developmental Psychology)

   This study examined the immediate effects of mask-wearing on infant selective visual attention to audiovisual speech in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Infants distribute their selective attention to regions of a speaker's face differentially based on their age and language experience. However, the potential impact wearing a face mask may have on infants' selective attention to audiovisual speech has not been systematically studied. We utilized eye tracking to examine the proportion of infant looking time to the eyes and mouth of a masked or unmasked actress speaking in a familiar or unfamiliar language. Six-month-old and 12-month-old infants (n= 42, 55% female, 91% White Non-Hispanic/Latino) were shown videos of an actress speaking in a familiar language (English) with and without a mask on, as well as videos of the same actress speaking in an unfamiliar language (German) with and without a mask. Overall, infants spent more time looking at the unmasked presentations compared to the masked presentations. Regardless of language familiarity or age, infants spent more time looking at the mouth area of an unmasked speaker and they spent more time looking at the eyes of a masked speaker. These findings indicate mask-wearing has immediate effects on the distribution of infant selective attention to different areas of the face of a speaker during audiovisual speech. 

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2. Neural Representations of Non-native Speech Reflect Proficiency and Interference from Native Language Knowledge

   https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0666-23.2023  

   Brodbeck, Christian; Kandylaki, Katerina Danae; Scharenborg, Odette (November 2023, The Journal of Neuroscience)

   Learning to process speech in a foreign language involves learning new representations for mapping the auditory signal to linguistic structure. Behavioral experiments suggest that even listeners that are highly proficient in a non-native language experience interference from representations of their native language. However, much of the evidence for such interference comes from tasks that may inadvertently increase the salience of native language competitors. Here we tested for neural evidence of proficiency and native language interference in a naturalistic story listening task. We studied electroencephalography responses of 39 native speakers of Dutch (14 male) to an English short story, spoken by a native speaker of either American English or Dutch. We modeled brain responses with multivariate temporal response functions, using acoustic and language models. We found evidence for activation of Dutch language statistics when listening to English, but only when it was spoken with a Dutch accent. This suggests that a naturalistic, monolingual setting decreases the interference from native language representations, whereas an accent in the listener's own native language may increase native language interference, by increasing the salience of the native language and activating native language phonetic and lexical representations. Brain responses suggest that such interference stems from words from the native language competing with the foreign language in a single word recognition system, rather than being activated in a parallel lexicon. We further found that secondary acoustic representations of speech (after 200 ms latency) decreased with increasing proficiency. This may reflect improved acoustic–phonetic models in more proficient listeners. Significance StatementBehavioral experiments suggest that native language knowledge interferes with foreign language listening, but such effects may be sensitive to task manipulations, as tasks that increase metalinguistic awareness may also increase native language interference. This highlights the need for studying non-native speech processing using naturalistic tasks. We measured neural responses unobtrusively while participants listened for comprehension and characterized the influence of proficiency at multiple levels of representation. We found that salience of the native language, as manipulated through speaker accent, affected activation of native language representations: significant evidence for activation of native language (Dutch) categories was only obtained when the speaker had a Dutch accent, whereas no significant interference was found to a speaker with a native (American) accent. 

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3. Pragmatics and social meaning: Understanding under-informativeness in native and non-native speakers

   Fairchild, Sarah; Mathis, Ariel; Papafragou, Anna (December 2019, International journal of cognitive science engineering and technology)

   Foreign-accented non-native speakers sometimes face negative biases compared to native speakers. Here we report an advantage in how comprehenders process the speech of non-native compared to native speakers. In a series of four experiments, we find that under-informative sentences are interpreted differently when attributed to non-native compared to native speakers. Specifically, under-informativeness is more likely to be attributed to inability (rather than unwillingness) to say more in non-native as compared to native speakers. This asymmetry has implications for learning: under-informative teachers are more likely to be given a second chance in case they are non-native speakers of the language (presumably because their prior under-informativeness is less likely to be intentional). Our results suggest strong effects of non-native speech on social-pragmatic inferences. Because these effects emerge for written stimuli, they support theories that stress the role of expectations on non-native comprehension, even in the absence of experience with foreign accents. Finally, our data bear on pragmatic theories of how speaker identity affects language comprehension and show how such theories offer an integrated framework for explaining how non-native language can lead to (sometimes unexpected) social meanings. 

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4. Bilingualism alters infants’ cortical organization for attentional orienting mechanisms

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13172  

   Arredondo, Maria M; Aslin, Richard N; Werker, Janet F (August 2021, Developmental Science)

   A bilingual environment is associated with changes in the brain's structure and function. Some suggest that bilingualism also improves higher‐cognitive functions in infants as young as 6‐months, yet whether this effect is associated with changes in the infant brain remains unknown. In the present study, we measured brain activity using functional near‐infrared spectroscopy in monolingual‐ and bilingual‐raised 6‐ and 10‐month‐old infants. Infants completed an orienting attention task, in which a cue was presented prior to an object appearing on the same (Valid) or opposite (Invalid) side of a display. Task performance did not differ between the groups but neural activity did. At 6‐months, both groups showed greater activity for Valid (> Invalid) trials in frontal regions (left hemisphere for bilinguals, right hemisphere for monolinguals). At 10‐months, bilinguals showed greater activity for Invalid (> Valid) trials in bilateral frontal regions, while monolinguals showed greater brain activity for Valid (> Invalid) trials in left frontal regions. Bilinguals’ brain activity trended with their parents’ reporting of dual‐language mixing when speaking to their child. These findings are the first to indicate how early (dual) language experience can alter the cortical organization underlying broader, non‐linguistic cognitive functions during the first year of life. 

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5. Perceptual consequences of native and non-native clear speech

   https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0009403  

   Kato, Misaki; Baese-Berk, Melissa M. (February 2022, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America)

   Native talkers are able to enhance acoustic characteristics of their speech in a speaking style known as “clear speech,” which is better understood by listeners than “plain speech.” However, despite substantial research in the area of clear speech, it is less clear whether non-native talkers of various proficiency levels are able to adopt a clear speaking style and if so, whether this style has perceptual benefits for native listeners. In the present study, native English listeners evaluated plain and clear speech produced by three groups: native English talkers, non-native talkers with lower proficiency, and non-native talkers with higher proficiency. Listeners completed a transcription task (i.e., an objective measure of the speech intelligibility). We investigated intelligibility as a function of language background and proficiency and also investigated the acoustic modifications that are associated with these perceptual benefits. The results of the study suggest that both native and non-native talkers modulate their speech when asked to adopt a clear speaking style, but that the size of the acoustic modifications, as well as consequences of this speaking style for perception differ as a function of language background and language proficiency. 

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