speech perception

As developmental science becomes more inclusive and ecologically valid, remote and online testing of infants is gaining momentum. Studying infants in their home environments holds promise: it reduces the burden on families, increases accessibility to underrepresented populations, and may yield more naturalistic behavior compared to lab settings. However, testing preverbal infants remotely comes with significant methodological challenges. Unlike older children or adults, infants cannot press buttons or follow verbal instructions, but we must rely on indirect measures such as gaze patterns.

The availability of a linguistic contrast between speech sounds (e.g. between [d] and [t]) in a given language is often modulated by the position (e.g. within the word) in which the sounds occur. One such example is the case of lexically stressed positions, in which contrast is more likely to be available than elsewhere in the word.

Background: The human brain can process single words during different tasks and via different modalities. We can hear the word ‘apple’ and repeat it out loud, or we see the word written on a page and read it, or we think of its concept, or see an image of it, and name it out loud. These three tasks (word repetition, reading and naming) require different computations at early stages, but share others at higher, amodal, levels.