Is speech learning 'gated' by the social brain?

Developmental Science

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 110-120

  Kuhl, Patricia K ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANIMAL; ATTENTION; HUMAN; HUMAN RELATION; INFANT; LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT; LEARNING; PHYSIOLOGY; REVIEW; SPEECH; THEORETICAL MODEL;

ANIMALS; ATTENTION; HUMANS; INFANT; INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS; LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT; MODELS, THEORETICAL; SPEECH; VERBAL LEARNING;

EID: 33845722684     PISSN: 1363755X     EISSN: 14677687     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00572.x     Document Type: Review

References (94)

1. Abramson, A.S., & Lisker, L. (1970). Discriminability along the voicing continuum: cross-language tests. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of Phonetic Sciences in Prague (pp. 569-573). Prague: Academia.
2. Adolphs, R. (2003). Cognitive neurosciences of human social behavior. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 165-178.
3. Adret, P. (1993). Operant conditioning, song learning and imprinting to taped song in the zebra finch. Animal Behavior, 46, 149-159.
4. Akhtar, N., & Tomasello, M. (1998). Intersubjectivity in early language learning and use. In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective communication and emotion in early ontogeny (pp. 316-335). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. Baldwin, D.A. (1995). Understanding the link between joint attention and language. In C. Moore & P.J. Dunham (Eds.), Joint attention: Its origins and role in development (pp. 131-158). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
6. Baptista, L.F., & Petrinovich, L. (1986). Song development in the white-crowned sparrow: social factors and sex differences. Animal Behavior, 34, 1359-1371.
7. Best, C., & McRoberts, G.W. (2003). Infant perception of nonnative consonant contrasts that adults assimilate in different ways. Language and Speech, 46, 183-216.
8. Bloom, K. (1975). Social elicitation of infant vocal behavior. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 20, 51-58.
9. Bloom, K., & Esposito, A. (1975). Social conditioning and its proper control procedures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 19, 209-222.
10. Bloom, K., Russell, A., & Wassenberg, K. (1987). Turn taking affects the quality of infant vocalizations. Journal of Child Language, 14, 211-227.
11. Brainard, M.S., & Knudsen, E.I. (1998). Sensitive periods for visual calibration of the auditory space map in the barn owl optic tectum. The Journal of Neuroscience, 18, 3929-3942.
12. Brooks, R., & Meltzoff, A.N. (2002). The importance of eyes: how infants interpret adult looking behavior. Developmental Psychology, 38, 958-966.
13. Brooks, R., & Meltzoff, A.N. (2005). The development of gaze following and its relation to language. Developmental Science, 8, 535-543.
14. Bruner, J. (1983). Child's talk: Learning to use language. New York: W.W. Norton.
15. Burnham, D., Kitamura, C., & Vollmer-Conner, U. (2002). What's new pussycat? On talking to babies and animals. Science, 296, 1435-1435.
16. Cheour, M., Ceponiene, R., Lehtokoski, A., Luuk, A., Allik, J., Alho, K., & Naatanen, R. (1998). Development of language-specific phoneme representations in the infant brain. Nature Neuroscience, 1, 351-353.
17. Conboy, B., Rivera-Gaxiola, M., Klarman, L., Aksoylu, E., & Kuhl, P.K. (2005). Associations between native and nonnative speech sound discrimination and language development at the end of the first year. In A. Brugos, M.R. Clark-Cotton, & S. Ha (Eds.), Supplement to the Proceedings of the 29th Boston University Conference on Language Development; http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/supp29.html
18. Conboy, B.T., & Kuhl, P.K. (2006). Event-related potentials to Spanish and English syllables in 11-month-old infants after short-term exposure to Spanish. Poster presented at the NSF Science of Learning Centers' Satellite Meeting at the Society for Neuroscience, 2006.
19. Dalston, R.M. (1975). Acoustic characteristics of English /w,r,l/ spoken correctly by young children and adults. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 57, 462-469.
20. de Boer, B., & Kuhl, P.K. (2003). Investigating the role of infant-directed speech with a computer model. Acoustic Research Letters Online (ARLO), 4, 129-134.
21. de Boysson-Bardies, B. (1993). Ontogeny of language-specific syllabic productions. In B. de Boysson-Bardies, S. de Schonen, P. Jusczyk, P. McNeilage, & J. Morton (Eds.), Developmental neurocognition: Speech and face processing in the first year of life (pp. 353-363). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer.
22. Doupe, A.J., & Kuhl, P.K. (1999). Birdsong and human speech: common themes and mechanisms. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 22, 567-631.
23. Dunbar, R.J.M. (1998). The social brain hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology, 6, 178-190.
24. Eales, L. (1989). The influences of visual and vocal interaction on song learning in zebra finches. Animal Behavior, 37, 507-508.
25. Eimas, P.D. (1975). Auditory and phonetic coding of the cues for speech: discrimination of the /r-l/ distinction by young infants. Perception and Psychophysics, 18, 341-347.
26. Eimas, P.D., Siqueland, E.R., Jusczyk, P., & Vigorito, J. (1971). Speech perception in infants. Science, 171, 303-306.
27. Evans, C.S., & Marler, P. (1995). Language and animal communication: parallels and contrasts. In H.L. Roitblat & J.-A. Meyer (Eds.), Comparative approaches to cognitive science: Complex adaptive systems (pp. 341-382). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
28. Fant, G. (1973). Speech sounds and features. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
29. Ferguson, C.A., Menn, L., & Stoel-Gammon, C. (Eds.) (1992). Phonological development: Models, research, implications. Timonium, MD: York Press.
30. Fernald, A. (1985). Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese. Infant Behavior and Development, 8, 181-195.
31. Fernald, A., & Kuhl, P.K. (1987). Acoustic determinants of infant preference for motherese speech. Infant Behavior and Development, 10, 279-293.
32. Flege, J.E. (1991). Age of learning affects the authenticity of voice-onset time (VOT) in stop consonants produced in a second language. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 89, 395-411.
33. Flege, J.E., Takagi, N., & Mann, V. (1995). Japanese adults can learn to produce English /r/ and /l/ accurately. Language and Speech, 38, 25-55.
34. Fromkin, V., Krashen, S., Curtiss, S., Rigler, D., & Rigler, M. (1974). The development of language in Genie: a case of language acquisition beyond the 'critical period'. Brain and Language, 1, 81-107.
35. Goldstein, M., King, A., & West, M. (2003). Social interaction shapes babbling: testing parallels between birdsong and speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100, 8030-8035.
36. Hillenbrand, J., Getty, L., Clark, M., & Wheeler, K. (1995). Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97, 3099-3111.
37. Imada, T., Zhang, Y., Cheour, M., Taulu, S., Ahonen, A., & Kuhl, P.K. (2006). Infant speech perception activates Broca's area: a developmental magnetoenceohalography study. NeuroReport, 17, 957-962.
38. Immelmann, K. (1969). Song development in the zebra finch and other estrildid finches. In R. Hinde (Ed.), Bird vocalizations (pp. 61-74). London: Cambridge University Press.
39. Iverson, P., Kuhl, P.K., Akahane-Yamada, R., Diesch, E., Tohkura, Y., Kettermann, A., & Siebert, C. (2003). A perceptual interference account of acquisition difficulties for non-native phonemes. Cognition, 87, B47-B57.
40. Johnson, M.H. (2005). The ontogeny of the social brain. In U. Mayr, E. Awh, & S.W. Keele (Eds.), Developing individuality in the human brain: A tribute to Michael Posner (pp. 125-140). Washington, DC: APA Press.
41. Kuhl, P.K. (1993). Early linguistic experience and phonetic perception: implications for theories of developmental speech perception. Journal of Phonetics, 21, 125-139.
42. Kuhl, P.K. (1994). Learning and representation in speech and language. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 4, 812-822.
43. Kuhl, P.K. (2004). Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 831-843.
44. Kuhl, P.K. (in press). Linking infant speech perception to language acquisition: phonetic learning predicts language growth. In P. McCardle, J. Colombo, & L. Freund (Eds.), Infant pathways to language: Methods, models, and research directions. Erlbaum: New York.
45. Kuhl, P.K., Andruski, J.E., Chistovich, I.A., Chistovich, L.A., Kozhevnikova, E.V., Ryskina, V.L., Stolyarova, E.I., Sundberg, U., & Lacerda, F. (1997). Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. Science, 277, 684-686.
46. Kuhl, P.K., Coffey-Corina, S., Padden, D., & Dawson, G. (2005). Links between social and linguistic processing of speech in preschool children with autism: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence. Developmental Science, 8, 1-12.
47. Kuhl, P.K., Conboy, B.T., Coffey-Corina, S., Padden, D., Rivera-Gaxiola, M., & Nelson, T. (in press). Developmental phonetic perception: native language magnet theory expanded (NLM-e). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
48. Kuhl, P.K., Conboy, B.T., Padden, D., Nelson, T., & Pruitt, J. (2005). Early speech perception and later language development: implications for the 'critical period'. Language Learning and Development, 1, 237-264.
49. Kuhl, P.K., & Meltzoff, A.N. (1982). The bimodal perception of speech in infancy. Science, 218, 1138-1141.
50. Kuhl, P.K., & Meltzoff, A.N. (1996). Infant vocalizations in response to speech: vocal imitation and developmental change. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 100, 2425-2438.
51. Kuhl, P.K., Stevens, E., Hayashi, A., Deguchi, T., Kiritani, S., & Iverson, P. (2006). Infants show facilitation for native language phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months. Developmental Science, 9, 13-21.
52. Kuhl, P.K., Tsao, F.-M., & Liu, H.-M. (2003). Foreign-language experience in infancy: effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 100, 9096-9101.
53. Kuhl, P.K., Williams, K.A., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K.N., & Lindblom, B. (1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. Science, 255, 606-608.
54. Kuhl, P.K., Williams, K.A., & Meltzoff, A.N. (1991). Cross-modal speech perception in adults and infants using nonspeech auditory stimuli. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 17, 829-840.
55. Lacerda, F. (in preparation). Acoustic analysis of Swedish /r/ and /l/.
56. Ladefoged, P. (2001). Vowels and consonants: An introduction to the sounds of language. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
57. Lasky, R.E., Syrdal-Lasky, A., & Klein, R.E. (1975). VOT discrimination by four to six and a half month old infants from Spanish environments. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 20, 215-225.
58. Liu, H.-M., Kuhl, P.K., & Tsao, F.-M. (2003). An association between mothers' speech clarity and infants' speech discrimination skills. Developmental Science, 6, F1-F10.
59. Liu, H.-M., Tsao, F.-M, & Kuhl, P.K. (in press). Lexical tone exaggeration in Mandarin infant-directed speech. Developmental Science.
60. Lotto, A.J., Sato, M., & Diehl, R. (2004). Mapping the task for the second language learner: the case of Japanese acquisition of /r/ and /l/. In J. Slitka, S. Manuel, & M. Matthies (Eds.), From sound to sense (pp. C181-C186). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
61. Marler, P. (1991). The instinct to learn. In S. Carey & R. Gelman (Eds.), The epigenesis of mind: Essays on biology and cognition (pp. 37-66). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
62. Maye, J., Werker, J.F., & Gerken, L. (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Cognition, 82, B101-B111.
63. Meltzoff, A.N. (1995). Understanding the intentions of others: re-enactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children. Developmental Psychology, 31, 838-850.
64. Meltzoff, A.N., & Decety, J. (2003). What imitation tells us about social cognition: a rapprochement between developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 358, 491-500.
65. Mundy, P., & Gomes, A. (1998). Individual differences in joint attention skill development in the second year. Infant Behavior and Development, 21, 469-482.
66. Nelson, D., & Marler, P. (1994). Selection-based learning in bird song development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 91, 10498-10501.
67. Posner, M.I. (Ed.) (2004). Cognitive neuroscience of attention. New York: Guilford Press.
68. Pulvermuller, F. (2005). Brain mechanisms linking language to action. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 574-582.
69. Quinn, P.C. (in press). Categorization. In A. Slater & M. Lewis (Eds.), Introduction to infant development (2nd edn.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
70. Rabiner, L.R., & Huang, B.H. (1993). Fundamentals of speech recognition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
71. Rivera-Gaxiola, M., Klarman, L., Garcia-Sierra, A., & Kuhl, P.K. (2005). Neural patterns to speech and vocabulary growth in American infants. NeuroReport, 16, 495-498.
72. Rivera-Gaxiola, M., Silvia-Pereyra, J., & Kuhl, P.K. (2005). Brain potentials to native and non-native speech contrasts in 7- and 11-month-old American infants. Developmental Science, 8, 162-172.
73. Rizzolatti, G. (2005). The mirror neuron system and imitation. In S. Hurley & N. Chater (Eds.), Perspectives on imitation: From neuroscience to social science - Volume 1: Mechanisms of imitation and imitation in animals (pp. 55-76). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
74. Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169-192.
75. Saffran, J.R. (2003). Statistical language learning: mechanisms and constraints. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 110-114.
76. Saffran, J., Aslin, R., & Newport, E. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month old infants. Science, 274, 1926-1928.
77. Sundara, M., Polka, L., & Genesee, F. (2006). Language-experience facilitates discrimination of /d-th/ in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of English. Cognition, 100, 369-388.
78. Tchernichovski, O., Mitra, P., Lints, T., & Nottebohm, F. (2001). Dynamics of the vocal imitation process: how a Zebra Finch learns its song. Science, 291, 2564-2569.
79. Tomasello, M. (2003a). Constructing a language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
80. Tomasello, M. (2003b). The key is social cognition. In D. Gentner & S. Kuczaj (Eds.), Language and thought (pp. 47-58). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
81. Tomasello, M., & Farrar, M.J. (1986). Joint attention and early language. Child Development, 57, 1454-1463.
82. Trevarthen, C., & Hubley, P. (1978). Secondary intersubjectivity: confidence, confiding, and acts of meaning in the first year. In A. Lock (Ed.), Action, gesture, and symbol (pp. 183-229). London: Academic Press.
83. Tsao, F.-M., Lui, H.-M., & Kuhl, P.K. (2004). Speech perception in infancy predicts language development in the second year of life: a longitudinal study. Child Development, 75, 1067-1084.
84. Tsao, F.-M., Liu, H.-M., & Kuhl, P.K. (in press). Perception of native and nonnative affricate-fricative contrasts: cross language tests on adults and infants. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
85. Tsushima, T., Takizawa, O., Sasaki, M., Shiraki, S., Nishi, K., Kohno, M., Menyuk, P., & Best, C. (1994). Discrimination of English /r-l/ and /w-y/ by Japanese infants at 6-12 months: language-specific developmental changes in speech perception abilities. Paper presented at the 1994 International Conference on Spoken Language, Yokohama, Japan.
86. Vouloumanos, A., & Werker, J.F. (2004). Tuned to the signal: the privileged status of speech for young infants. Developmental Science, 7, 270-276.
87. Vygotsky, L.S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
88. Watson, J.S. (1979). Perception of contingency as a determinant of social responsiveness. In E.B. Thomas (Ed.), The origins of social responsiveness (pp. 33-64). New York: Erlbaum.
89. Watson, J.S. (2005). The elementary nature of purposive behavior: evolving minimal neural structures that display intrinsic intentionality. Evolutionary Psychology, 3, 24-48.
90. Werker, J.F., & Lalonde, C. (1988). Cross-language speech perception: initial capabilites and developmental change. Developmental Psychology, 24, 672-683.
91. Werker, J.F., & Tees, R.C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 7, 49-63.
92. Werker, J.F., Pons, F., Dietrich, C., Kajikawa, S., Fais, L., & Amano, S. (in press). Infant-directed speech supports phonetic category learning in English and Japanese. Cognition.
93. West, M., & King, A. (1988). Female visual displays affect the development of male song in the cowbird. Nature, 334, 244-246.
94. Yoshida, K.A., Pons, F., Cady, J.C., & Werker, J.F. (2006). Distributional learning and attention in phonological development. Paper presented at International Conference on Infant Studies, Kyoto, Japan, 19-23 June.