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1. Talk Is Cheap

   https://doi.org/10.37282/991819.20.42  

   Berent, Iris (September 2020, Inference: International Review of Science)

   null (Ed.)

   Speech and language are so tightly linked that they are often considered inseparable. But what of sign language? Iris Berent sheds light on this oft-neglected branch of linguistics, which may hold the key to disrupting some long-held truths in the domain. While speech may be the default linguistic channel in hearing communities, language and its channel might not be one and the same. 

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2. Infants differentially extract rules from language

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-99539-8  

   Berent, Iris; de la Cruz-Pavía, Irene; Brentari, Diane; Gervain, Judit (December 2021, Scientific Reports)

   Abstract Infants readily extract linguistic rules from speech. Here, we ask whether this advantage extends to linguistic stimuli that do not rely on the spoken modality. To address this question, we first examine whether infants can differentially learn rules from linguistic signs. We show that, despite having no previous experience with a sign language, six-month-old infants can extract the reduplicative rule (AA) from dynamic linguistic signs, and the neural response to reduplicative linguistic signs differs from reduplicative visual controls, matched for the dynamic spatiotemporal properties of signs. We next demonstrate that the brain response for reduplicative signs is similar to the response to reduplicative speech stimuli. Rule learning, then, apparently depends on the linguistic status of the stimulus, not its sensory modality. These results suggest that infants are language-ready. They possess a powerful rule system that is differentially engaged by all linguistic stimuli, speech or sign. 

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3. Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis (“TOPsy”): Psychometric Validation of a Brief Scalable Test of Lexical Stress Perception

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2022.765945  

   Nayak, Srishti; Gustavson, Daniel E.; Wang, Youjia; Below, Jennifer E.; Gordon, Reyna L.; Magne, Cyrille L. (February 2022, Frontiers in Neuroscience)

   Prosody perception is fundamental to spoken language communication as it supports comprehension, pragmatics, morphosyntactic parsing of speech streams, and phonological awareness. A particular aspect of prosody: perceptual sensitivity to speech rhythm patterns in words (i.e., lexical stress sensitivity), is also a robust predictor of reading skills, though it has received much less attention than phonological awareness in the literature. Given the importance of prosody and reading in educational outcomes, reliable and valid tools are needed to conduct large-scale health and genetic investigations of individual differences in prosody, as groundwork for investigating the biological underpinnings of the relationship between prosody and reading. Motivated by this need, we present the Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis (“TOPsy”) and highlight its merits as a phenotyping tool to measure lexical stress sensitivity in as little as 10 min, in scalable internet-based cohorts. In this 28-item speech rhythm perception test [modeled after the stress identification test from Wade-Woolley (2016) ], participants listen to multi-syllabic spoken words and are asked to identify lexical stress patterns. Psychometric analyses in a large internet-based sample shows excellent reliability, and predictive validity for self-reported difficulties with speech-language, reading, and musical beat synchronization. Further, items loaded onto two distinct factors corresponding to initially stressed vs. non-initially stressed words. These results are consistent with previous reports that speech rhythm perception abilities correlate with musical rhythm sensitivity and speech-language/reading skills, and are implicated in reading disorders (e.g., dyslexia). We conclude that TOPsy can serve as a useful tool for studying prosodic perception at large scales in a variety of different settings, and importantly can act as a validated brief phenotype for future investigations of the genetic architecture of prosodic perception, and its relationship to educational outcomes. 

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4. Relating referential clarity and phonetic clarity in infant‐directed speech

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13442  

   Beech, Caroline; Swingley, Daniel (August 2023, Developmental Science)

   Abstract Psycholinguistic research on children's early language environments has revealed many potential challenges for language acquisition. One is that in many cases, referents of linguistic expressions are hard to identify without prior knowledge of the language. Likewise, the speech signal itself varies substantially in clarity, with some productions being very clear, and others being phonetically reduced, even to the point of uninterpretability. In this study, we sought to better characterize the language‐learning environment of American English‐learning toddlers by testing how well phonetic clarity and referential clarity align in infant‐directed speech. Using an existing Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) corpus with referential transparency measurements and adding new measures of phonetic clarity, we found that the phonetic clarity of words’ first mentions significantly predicted referential clarity (how easy it was to guess the intended referent from visual information alone) at that moment. Thus, when parents’ speech was especially clear, the referential semantics were also clearer. This suggests that young children could use the phonetics of speech to identify globally valuable instances that support better referential hypotheses, by homing in on clearer instances and filtering out less‐clear ones. Such multimodal “gems” offer special opportunities for early word learning. Research HighlightsIn parent‐infant interaction, parents’ referential intentions are sometimes clear and sometimes unclear; likewise, parents’ pronunciation is sometimes clear and sometimes quite difficult to understand.We find that clearer referential instances go along with clearer phonetic instances, more so than expected by chance.Thus, there are globally valuable instances (“gems”) from which children could learn about words’ pronunciations and words’ meanings at the same time.Homing in on clear phonetic instances and filtering out less‐clear ones would help children identify these multimodal “gems” during word learning. 

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5. Complexity in sign languages

   https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0005  

   Malaia, Evie A.; Borneman, Joshua D.; Kurtoglu, Emre; Gurbuz, Sevgi Z.; Griffin, Darrin; Crawford, Chris; Gurbuz, Ali C. (October 2022, Linguistics Vanguard)

   Abstract Sign languages are human communication systems that are equivalent to spoken language in their capacity for information transfer, but which use a dynamic visual signal for communication. Thus, linguistic metrics of complexity, which are typically developed for linear, symbolic linguistic representation (such as written forms of spoken languages) do not translate easily into sign language analysis. A comparison of physical signal metrics, on the other hand, is complicated by the higher dimensionality (spatial and temporal) of the sign language signal as compared to a speech signal (solely temporal). Here, we review a variety of approaches to operationalizing sign language complexity based on linguistic and physical data, and identify the approaches that allow for high fidelity modeling of the data in the visual domain, while capturing linguistically-relevant features of the sign language signal. 

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