ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024

Sensorimotor influences on infant speech perception also target prosody

Sónia Frota, Cátia Severino, Jovana Pejovic, Marina Vigário

Sensorimotor influences on infant auditory speech perception have been shown to modulate phoneme discrimination, highlighting the integration of sensorimotor information and auditory speech prior to production. Although the perception of prosody is multimodal, sensorimotor influences on prosody perception have not been investigated. We examined the generalizability and potential cross-domain impact of sensorimotor influences beyond phoneme perception, by testing a novel phoneme contrast (/da/-/za/), a stress contrast (trochaic/iambic) and an intonation contrast (H+L* L% / H+L* LH%). In 3 experiments, 6-month-old infants listened to the speech contrasts without and with oral-motor impairments induced by two teething toys: a gummy teether and a flat teether. Infants discriminated the segmental contrast only in the absence of a teething toy. Similarly, the stress contrast was discriminated without a teether, while both teethers disrupted discrimination. Discrimination of the intonation contrast was found both in the absence of the teething toys and in the gummy teether condition, but not in the flat teether condition. Our results are the first to suggest that sensorimotor influences modulate speech perception beyond phoneme discrimination. Their effects on infants’ prosody perception were different for stress and intonation, pointing to specificities in the perception-production link with stress being more disrupted than intonation.