Papers by Natalia Kartushina
Speech of late second language (L2) learners is often marked by a foreign accent. This study exam... more Speech of late second language (L2) learners is often marked by a foreign accent. This study examines the use of auditory feedback alteration (FA) as a training tool to improve L2 sound pronunciation. Twenty native Spanish speakers with low English proficiency formed two groups: the experimental group went through three consecutive days of 20-min FA training, while the control group performed the same procedure but without any alteration. After training, the experimental group showed significant improvement in their English vowel production and perception. This improvement was consistent when retested one week later. The control group showed no such improvement. While previous research has shown that FA modifies speech sound production in native speakers, no long-lasting effects have been reported, alterations returning to baseline after the experimental procedure. This study demonstrates how FA can lead to a long-lasting improvement of non-native vowel production and gives promising evidence of transfer to perception.
The current work assessed metacognition in non-native language speech perception and production. ... more The current work assessed metacognition in non-native language speech perception and production. Spanish novice learners of French identified and produced French vowel contrast /ø/-/œ/ and rated, on each trial, their confidence in the response. Confidence in perception predicted participants’ identification accuracy, suggesting that novice learners’ metacognitive skills in non-native speech perception are efficient at the onset of language learning. However, confidence in production did not align with a fine-grained precision measure of one’s own production - indexed by Mahalanobis distance to the native French target-vowel space, nor with a categorical measure of production - in terms of being within/outside the native-speakers’ zone - indicating metacognition in non-native sound productions is not yet efficient in novice learners. Overall, confidence ratings were similar and highly correlated between the perception and production tasks, but there was no association between the two...
Previous research on infant-directed speech (IDS) and its role in infants’ language development h... more Previous research on infant-directed speech (IDS) and its role in infants’ language development has largely focused on mothers, with fathers being investigated scarcely, if at all. Here we examine the acoustics of IDS as compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) in Norwegian mothers and fathers to 8–month-old infants, and whether these relate to direct (eye-tracking) and indirect (parental report) measures of infants’ word comprehension. Forty- five parent-infant dyads participated in the study. Parents (24 mothers, 21 fathers) were recorded reading a picture book to their infant (IDS), and to an experimenter (ADS), ensuring identical linguistic context across speakers and registers. Results showed that both mothers’ and fathers’ IDS had exaggerated prosody, expanded vowel spaces, and more variable and less distinct vowels. We found no evidence that acoustic features of parents’ speech were associated with infants’ word comprehension, suggesting that a facilitating role of IDS may app...
French (or English) native listeners hear /kl/ when presented with the illegal consonant sequence... more French (or English) native listeners hear /kl/ when presented with the illegal consonant sequence */tl/. This robust case of perceptual repair is usually viewed as operating at a prelexical level of speech processing but the evidence against lexical feedback is somewhat weak. In this study, we report new data supporting the prelexical hypothesis, obtained with a paradigm that avoids most of the possible confounds in previous studies. In a cross-modal auditory-visual priming paradigm, lexical decisions to the same visual target "clavier" are facilitated by the auditory prime *tlavier, not by *dlavier. Likewise, the recognition of "glacier" is facilitated by *dlacier, not by *tlacier. To summarize, velar stop + /l/ words are exclusively facilitated by the dental-initial derived forms with the same voicing. Derived forms with the opposite voicing tend to induce inhibition rather than facilitation. Hence, the observed facilitation effects are not graded from */tl/ to */dl/ or vice versa. We argue that these rather surprising all-or-none priming effects exclude the possibility that the */tl/→/kl/ and */dl/→/gl/ repairs are due, even partly, to lexical feedback.
Journal of Phonetics, 2016
We studied mutual influences between native and non-native vowel production during learning, i.e.... more We studied mutual influences between native and non-native vowel production during learning, i.e., before and after short-term visual articulatory feedback training with non-native sounds. Monolingual French speakers were trained to produce two non-native vowels: the Danish /ɔ/, which is similar to the French /o/, and the Russian /ɨ/, which is dissimilar from French vowels. We examined relationships between the production of French and non-native vowels before training, and the effects of training with non-native vowels on the production of French ones. We assessed the acoustic position and compactness of the trained vowels, and of the French /o/, /ø/, /y/ and /i/ vowels, which are acoustically closest to the trained vowels. Before training, the compactness of the French vowels was positively related to the accuracy and compactness in the production of non-native vowels. After training, French speakers' accuracy and stability in the production of the two trained vowels improved on average by
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2015
Second-language learners often experience major difficulties in producing non-native speech sound... more Second-language learners often experience major difficulties in producing non-native speech sounds. This paper introduces a training method that uses a real-time analysis of the acoustic properties of vowels produced by non-native speakers to provide them with immediate, trial-by-trial visual feedback about their articulation alongside that of the same vowels produced by native speakers. The Mahalanobis acoustic distance between non-native productions and target native acoustic spaces was used to assess L2 production accuracy. The experiment shows that 1 h of training per vowel improves the production of four non-native Danish vowels: the learners' productions were closer to the corresponding Danish target vowels after training. The production performance of a control group remained unchanged. Comparisons of pre- and post-training vowel discrimination performance in the experimental group showed improvements in perception. Correlational analyses of training-related changes in pr...
The COVID-19 pandemic massively changed the context and feasibility of developmental research. Th... more The COVID-19 pandemic massively changed the context and feasibility of developmental research. This new reality as well as considerations, e.g., about sample diversity and naturalistic settings for developmental research, indicate the need for solutions for online studies. In this article, we present e-Babylab, an open-source browser-based tool for unmoderated online studies specifically targeted at studying young children and babies. e-Babylab offers an intuitive graphical user interface for study creation and management of studies, users, participant data, and stimulus material with no programming skills required. Various kinds of audiovisual media can be presented as stimuli and possible measures include webcam recordings, audio recordings, key presses, mouse-click/touch coordinates, and reaction times. Information pages, consent forms, and participant forms are all customizable. e-Babylab was used with a variety of measures and paradigms in 14 studies with children aged 12 month...
This study examined children’s screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in a large cohort (... more This study examined children’s screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in a large cohort (n=2209) of 8-to-36-month-olds sampled from 15 labs across 11 countries. Caregivers reported that young infants and toddlers with no online schooling requirements were exposed to more screen time during lockdown than before lockdown. While this was exacerbated for countries with longer lockdowns, there was no evidence that the increase in screen time during lockdown was associated with children’s demographics, e.g., age, SES. However, screen time during lockdown was negatively associated with child age and SES and positively associated with caregiver screen time and attitudes towards children’s screen time. The results highlight the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on young children’s screen time.
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedent... more The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries (from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child’s development or vocabulary developme...
Education Sciences
Emotion understanding develops intensively in preschool and junior school. Although the parent/fa... more Emotion understanding develops intensively in preschool and junior school. Although the parent/family environment has been shown to affect the development of emotion understanding in children, very little research has examined examined how parents’ view upbringing and education and how they are related to their child’s emotion understanding, given that the intuitive theories of parenting are reflected in actual parent behavior. This study fills this gap in the literature and examines the links between children’s ability to understand emotions and their parents’ intuitive theories of parenting. The sample was 171 5- to 6-year-old children and their parents. Analyses revealed a significant relation between intuitive theories of parenting and children’s emotion understanding. In particular, the intuitive attitude of uninvolved parenting was associated with the understanding of mental causes of emotions and the overall level of emotion understanding in preschool children. Integrating th...
Behavioral Sciences
This study examined the relationship between working memory capacity and narrative abilities in 5... more This study examined the relationship between working memory capacity and narrative abilities in 5–6-year-old children. 269 children were assessed on their visual and verbal working memory and performed in a story retelling and a story creation (based on a single picture and on a series of pictures) tasks. The stories were evaluated on their macrostructure and microstructure. The results revealed a significant relationship between both components (verbal and visual) of working memory and the global indicators of a story’s macrostructure—such as semantic completeness, semantic adequacy, programming and narrative structure—and with the indicators of a story’s microstructure, such as grammatical accuracy and number of syntagmas. Yet, this relationship was systematically stronger for verbal working memory, as compared to visual working memory, suggesting that a well-developed verbal working memory leads to lexically and grammatically more accurate language production in preschool children.
Клиническая и специальная психология
The article presents the data of the study of working memory and features of oral monologue speec... more The article presents the data of the study of working memory and features of oral monologue speech in preschool children. 269 children (133 boys and 136 girls) aged 5-6 years (M=5.6 years; Sd=0.48) attending the senior group of kindergarten in Moscow were examined. Features of oral monologue speech development were studied using methods developed in the Russian neuropsychology: tasks for retelling the text and compiling the story of a series of pictures. General neuropsychological parameters, separate lexical and grammatical (morphology and syntax) indicators, macrostructure of the narrative were analyzed in the evaluation of children's responses. As a result of the correlation and cluster analysis, similar links were obtained: the level of working memory development in preschoolers is correlated with such indicators of the child's speech development as semantic completeness of the text, its…
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Bilinguals show a large gap in their expressive-receptive abilities, in both languages. To date, ... more Bilinguals show a large gap in their expressive-receptive abilities, in both languages. To date, most studies have examined lexical processing. The current study aimed to assess comprehension and production of verb agreement, i.e., grammatical processing, in bilinguals, and to examine the factors that might modulate them: exposure, age and language-specific morphological complexity. Twenty balanced Basque-Spanish bilinguals (10 adults and 10 children) were assessed on comprehension and production of subject-verb agreement in both languages and object-verb agreement in Basque. Twenty age-matched Spanish-dominant Basque-Spanish bilinguals were assessed in Spanish only. The results revealed a consistent gap in Basque in both children and adults, with an advantage for comprehension. In Spanish, a gap appeared in children only, with an advantage for production. The gap size did not vary with the amount of language exposure but with age and morphological complexity, suggesting that these ...
Royal Society Open Science
The past 5 years have witnessed claims that infants as young as six months of age understand the ... more The past 5 years have witnessed claims that infants as young as six months of age understand the meaning of several words. To reach this conclusion, researchers presented infants with pairs of pictures from distinct semantic domains and observed longer looks at an object upon hearing its name as compared with the name of the other object. However, these gaze patterns might indicate infants' sensibility to the word frequency and/or its contextual relatedness to the object regardless of a firm semantic understanding of this word. The current study attempted, first, to replicate, in Norwegian language, the results of recent studies showing that six- to nine-month-old English-learning infants understand the meaning of many common words. Second, it assessed the robustness of a ‘comprehension’ interpretation by dissociating semantic knowledge from confounded extra-linguistic cues via the manipulation of the contingency between words and objects. Our planned analyses revealed that Norw...
The field of psychology has become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and ... more The field of psychology has become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability. Infancy researchers face specific challenges related to replicability: high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations, amongst other factors. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multi-site study aimed at 1) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically-important phenomenon and 2) examining methodological, situational, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult were created using semi-naturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings in North American English. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across XYZ laboratories in North America and Europe using the three common...
Language Learning
Compared to low variability perception training, high variability training leads to better learni... more Compared to low variability perception training, high variability training leads to better learning outcomes and supports generalization of learning. However, it is unclear whether the learning advantage is due to a presence of multiple talkers or to enhanced acoustic variability across target sounds. The current study addressed this issue in nonnative production learning. Spanish speakers were trained to produce the French /e/-/ɛ/ vowel contrast. The stimuli were recorded by five native French talkers for the multiple taker (MT) group or by one talker for
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Papers by Natalia Kartushina