Contrastive Linguistics in Babies- Edited by Aishee Biswas

A recent paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by two computational linguists affiliated with the University of Maryland sheds new light on this crucial topic for a better understanding of how infants acquire the sounds of their native language.

 

The process by which babies learn contrastive linguistics is still being studied by researchers. While infants are able to distinguish most sounds shortly after birth, they become language-specific listeners by the age of one. However, it is unclear how babies learn to recognize which acoustic dimensions of their language are contrastive. The term "contrastive" refers to differences between speech sounds that can alter the meanings of words. For instance, in English, [b] and [d] are contrastive because changing the [b] in "ball" to a [d] results in a different word, "doll."

 

Kasia Hitczenko's research suggests that infants can recognize and differentiate between acoustic sounds based on contextual clues such as neighboring sounds, contrary to previous beliefs that differences in contrastive sounds were obvious. Hitczenko's team conducted two case studies comparing data on Japanese, Dutch, and French, and found that vowel duration plots varied distinctly in different contexts for Japanese but not for French. The researchers collected speech occurring in different contexts and made plots summarizing the vowel durations in each context. Co-author Naomi Feldman, an associate professor of linguistics, believes that their work presents a compelling account of how infants learn speech contrasts in their language and that their findings can be applied to other languages. Hitczenko received her doctorate in linguistics from the University of Maryland in 2019 and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.