Marina Nespor - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Marina Nespor

The sound pattern of the language(s) we have heard as infants affects the way in which we perceiv... more The sound pattern of the language(s) we have heard as infants affects the way in which we perceive linguistic sounds as adults. Typically, some foreign sounds are very difficult to perceive accurately, even after extensive training. For instance, native speakers of French have troubles distinguishing foreign words that differ only in the position of main stress, French being a language in which stress is not contrastive. In this paper, we propose to explore the perception of foreign sounds cross-linguistically in order to understand the processes that govern early language acquisition. Specifically, we propose to test the hypothesis that early language acquisition begins by using only regularities that infants can observe in the surface speech stream (Bottom-Up Bootstrapping), and compare it with the hypothesis that they use all possible sources of information, including, for instance, word boundaries (Interactive Bootstrapping). We set up a research paradigm using the stress system, since it allows to test the various options at hand within a single test procedure. We distinguish four types of regular stress systems the acquisition of which requires different sources of information. We show that the two hypotheses make contrastive predictions as to the pattern of stress perception of adults in these four types of languages. We conclude that cross-linguistic research of adults speech perception, when coupled with detailed linguistic analysis, can be brought to bear on important issues of language acquisition.

The domain of final lengthening in production and perception in Dutch

5th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1997)

will allow us to answer the following question: Two production experiments investigating possible... more will allow us to answer the following question: Two production experiments investigating possible factors influencing the domain of final lengthening are described. Results indicate that final lengthening is generally confined to the final syllable, except when its rhyme contains only a schwa, in which case the penultimate rhyme is lengthened as well. Apparently, only the weight of the final syllable influences the size of the domain which is lengthened. Next, a perceptual acceptability experiment was run. Results indicate that while listeners are sensitive to differences in the amount of final lengthening, they are not very sensitive to the way this is distributed over the preboundary segments. Apparently, the specific distribution of final lengthening in production has no communicative function, but is the result of the human speech mechanism, together with restrictions on the expandability of segments.

Chapter 3. The Syllable and the Foot

Arhythmic Sequences and their Resolutions in Italian and Greek

Stress-Timedvs. Syllable-Timed Languages

The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, 2011

On the rhythm parameter in phonology

Logical Issues in Language Acquisition, 1990

Developmental Psychology, 2019

About Parameters, Prominence, and Bootstrapping

Language, Brain, and Cognitive Development, 2002

is provided in screen-viewable form for personal use only by members

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

From the first moments of their life, infants show a preference for their native language, as wel... more From the first moments of their life, infants show a preference for their native language, as well as toward speakers with whom they share the same language. This preference appears to have broad consequences in various domains later on, supporting group affiliations and collaborative actions in children. Here, we propose that infants' preference for native speakers of their language also serves a further purpose, specifically allowing them to efficiently acquire culture specific knowledge via social learning. By selectively attending to informants who are native speakers of their language and who probably also share the same cultural background with the infant, young learners can maximize the possibility to acquire cultural knowledge. To test whether infants would preferably attend the information they receive from a speaker of their native language, we familiarized 12-month-old infants with a native and a foreign speaker, and then presented them with movies where each of the speakers silently gazed toward unfamiliar objects. At test, infants' looking behavior to the two objects alone was measured. Results revealed that infants preferred to look longer at the object presented by the native speaker. Strikingly, the effect was replicated also with 5-monthold infants, indicating an early development of such preference. These findings provide evidence that young infants pay more attention to the information presented by a person with whom they share the same language. This selectivity can serve as a basis for efficient social learning by influencing how infants' allocate attention between potential sources of information in their environment.

La Prosodia / M. Nespor, Irene Vogel

Texto sobre teoría fonológica, que aborda la relación entre la fonología y el resto de los consti... more Texto sobre teoría fonológica, que aborda la relación entre la fonología y el resto de los constitutivos gramaticales, así como cuestiones afines tales como la percepción y la métrica poética.

Scientific Reports, 2015

Infants’ sensitivity to selectively attend to human speech and to process it in a unique way has ... more Infants’ sensitivity to selectively attend to human speech and to process it in a unique way has been widely reported in the past. However, in order to successfully acquire language, one should also understand that speech is a referential and that words can stand for other entities in the world. While there has been some evidence showing that young infants can make inferences about the communicative intentions of a speaker, whether they would also appreciate the direct relationship between a specific word and its referent, is still unknown. In the present study we tested four-month-old infants to see whether they would expect to find a referent when they hear human speech. Our results showed that compared to other auditory stimuli or to silence, when infants were listening to speech they were more prepared to find some visual referents of the words, as signalled by their faster orienting towards the visual objects. Hence, our study is the first to report evidence that infants at a v...

What do we learn when we acquire a language?

Linguistic Studies in Honor of Henk van Riemsdijk

Psychological Science, 2011

The phonology of clitic groups

Volume 5/Part 1: Clitics in the Languages of Europe, 1999

2. Stress domains

Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, 1999

... Gleitman &amp;amp; Wanner 1982; Echols &amp;amp; Newport 1992; Sansavini, Ber... more ... Gleitman &amp;amp; Wanner 1982; Echols &amp;amp; Newport 1992; Sansavini, Bertoucini &amp;amp; Giovanelli 1997), the conclusion can be drawn that prosodic structure is the decisive cue to fix the syntactic parameter concerning the direction of recursivity of the language. ...

The phonological word in Greek and Italian

Sandhi Phenomena in the Languages of Europe

Morphology–phonology interface: Phonological domains in Greek compounds

The Linguistic Review, 1996

This paper deals with a case of morphology phonology interaction, specifically, stress in Greek ... more This paper deals with a case of morphology phonology interaction, specifically, stress in Greek compounding. It is claimed that two types of compounds are distinguished with respect to the stressing procedure: a) [stem + stem] com-pounds, submitted to the application of the ...

Science, 2002

Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebr... more Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebraic-like computations to discover higher level (grammatical) structure. Here we show that these computations can be influenced by subtle cues in the speech signal. After a short familiarization to a continuous speech stream, adult listeners are able to segment it using powerful statistics, but they fail to extract the structural regularities included in the stream even when the familiarization is greatly extended. With the introduction of subliminal segmentation cues, however, these regularities can be rapidly captured.

On clashes and lapses

Phonology, 1989

In phonology, one of the generalisations that seems to hold true across most, if not all, languag... more In phonology, one of the generalisations that seems to hold true across most, if not all, languages is that the overall rhythmic pattern tends to be organised such that there is an alternation of strong and weak syllables (cf. among others, Hayes 1980, 1984; Prince 1983; Selkirk 1984). In other words, languages tend to avoid strings of adjacent strong syllables, as well as strings of adjacent weak syllables. These generalisations are expressed by clauses (a) and (b), respectively, of Selkirk's Principle of Rhythmic Alternation (PRA):(1)Principle of Rhythmic Alternation(Selkirk 1984: 52)a. Every strong position on a metrical levelnshould be followed by at least one weak position on that levelb. Any weak position on a metrical levelnmay be preceded by at most one weak position on that levelOf course, the underlying rhythmic patterns of a language are not always in conformity with the PRA.