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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. “Es una pelota, do you like the ball?”: Pitch in Spanish-English bilingual infant directed speech

   https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2025.2575381  

   Barajas, Andrea Ramirez; Cohn, Michelle; Zellou, Georgia; Graf_Estes, Katharine (October 2025, Language Learning and Development)

   Not AvailableThe goal of this research is to understand how bilingual and monolingual parents adjust their speech when talking to infants. We examined pitch characteristics of infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) with Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual parents and their infants (8–20 months of age). Thirty-eight parent-infant dyads participated in two naturalistic play tasks. Parents spoke with a bilingual researcher to collect samples of ADS. Results showed that both parent groups produced higher maximum and average fundamental frequency in IDS than ADS, suggesting that caregivers adjust pitch similarly in IDS across registers. However, for bilinguals, the IDS versus ADS difference was larger in English than Spanish; bilingual parents differentiated IDS adjustments across languages. The analyses across word repetitions revealed that in bilingual parents’ IDS, there was no change in pitch across the first and second repetitions of target words, even when repetitions occurred in different languages. Taken together, results suggest that bilingual parents adjust their IDS pitch similarly to English-speaking monolinguals, but they differentiate English and Spanish IDS adjustments. Overall, this project contributes to our understanding of parents’ register adjustments across multilingual language learning contexts. 

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3. The intelligibility of consonants in American English infant-directed speech

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2025.101766  

   Swingley, Daniel (November 2025, Cognitive Psychology)

   To begin learning their language, infants must locate words in the speech signal. Some models of word discovery presuppose that the discovery process depends on identifying phonetic segments (phones) in speech. To test the plausibility of models arguing that infants can reliably categorize consonants in speech, adult native speakers were asked to identify the consonant in vowel-consonant-vowel sequences extracted from spontaneous English infant-directed speech. Listeners could consistently identify some instances of consonants (for example, correctly indicating that an /s/ was an /s/). But many tokens (about half) were not consistently identifiable. Performance was significantly worse for codas than onsets. Providing the full utterance context in low-pass-filtered form did not aid recognition, nor did familiarization with the talker. In a second task, listeners were barely above chance in guessing whether a consonant was a word onset or a word-final coda. Performance on infant-directed speech was not markedly better than performance on a comparison set of adult-directed speech consonants. Erroneous responses frequently had little systematic resemblance to the correct answer. The results suggest that it is not plausible that infants can parse most utterances exhaustively into strings of uttered speech sounds and feed those strings into a statistical clustering mechanism. 

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4. 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 (January 2024, 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 acousticphonetic 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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5. 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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