International Symposium

Learning
Learning Sounds
Soundsofof Asian
Asian Languages
Languages
イマ、アジアノ言語ガ オモシロイ
Katherine Demuth (Macquarie Univ.)
Leher Singh (National Univ. of Singapore)
Henny Yeung (Simon Fraser Univ.)
Chutamanee Onsuwan (Thammasat Univ.)
Youngon Choi (Chung-Ang Univ.)
Mutsumi Imai (Keio Univ.)
Hyun Kyung Hwang (Univ. of Tsukuba)
Reiko Mazuka (RIKEN CBS)

6th Jul. 201910:00〜17:00
more info.

21 KOMCEE EAST-K011
Komaba Campus
The University of Tokyo

JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientiﬁc Research (S)16H06319
JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientiﬁc Research on Innovative Areas(4903, 17H06382)
NINJAL collaborative research project ʻCross-linguistic Studies of Japanese Prosody and Grammarʼ国際シンポジウム「イマ、アジアノ言語ガ オモシロイ：

Learning Sounds of Asian Languages」
共催:

・科学研究費補助金基盤研究（S）「乳児音声発達の起源に迫る：アジアの言語から見た発達メカニズムの解明」(16H06319)

・科学研究費補助金新学術領域研究（研究領域提案型）
共創的コミュニケーションのための言語進化学(4903)「言語の発達過程の認知科学的研究」(17H06382)

・国立国語研究所機関拠点型基幹研究プロジェクト「多様な言語資源に基づく総合的日本語研究の開拓」：対照言語学の観点から見た日本語の音声と文法

Time Table
10:00-10:20 Opening Remark-Why Asian languages now?
(Dr.Mazuka)
Learning unusual sound contrasts with diachronic changes:
10:20-11:00The case for Korean.
(Dr. Choi)
The Acquisition of lexical tones in infancy and early childhood.
11:00-11:40(Dr. Singh)
11:40-13:00
Lunch Time
The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis: How children
13:00-13:40 bootstrap themselves from multi-sensory mapping to languagespecific linguistic systems.
(Dr. Imai)
Babytalk is not always WEIRD: Distinct acoustic characteristics of
13:40-14:20 infant- versus adult-directed speech in Lenakel (Austronesian)and English (Indo-European).
(Dr. Yeung)
Acoustic characteristics of motherese and early perceptual
14:20-15:00 development: A case study of Japanese stops.
(Dr. Hwang)
15:00-15:20

Coffee BreakPhonetic modifications of Thai stops' Voice-Onset-Time, vowel
15:20-16:00 duration, and lexical tones in Infant-Directed Speech.(Dr.Onsuwan)
Learning the tones of Mandarin: Acoustic evidence from children
16:00-16:40 with cochlear implants.
(Dr. Demuth)
General Discussion
16:40-17:00
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会場アクセス： 京王井の頭線駒場東大前駅下車
東京大学駒場キャンパスⅠ

21 KOMCEE EAST K011
Admission：FreeLearning unusual sound contrasts with diachronicchanges: The case for Korean.
Youngon Choi
Chung-Ang University, South Korea
Compared to other languages, phonetic categories utilized in Korean are
relatively unusual: (1) stops and affricates contrast in three ways as fortis,
lenis, and aspirated and they are all voiceless. Fricative contrast is also all
voiceless unlike other languages although they do not contrast in three ways.
(2) two of the three categories, lenis and aspirated, have undergone a
tonogenetic sound change in the past few decades such that voice onset time
is no longer the primary cue for distinction and instead, fundamental
frequency has become the primary cue for their distinction. Using visual
habituation paradigm, we have been investigating 4-12-month-old Korean
infants’ development of the ability to discriminate these sound categories,
including three-way bilabial stop and affricate contrasts and two-way
fricative contrast and the relevant acoustic properties of the maternal input
to these infants. The emerging patterns from these studies show thatlearning of these unusual contrasts take longer to develop and that thisdelay may be related to the acoustic parameters associated with these soundcategories as well as to the diachronic change occurring in the input. The
acoustic properties of the input provided for infants appear to play animportant role in shaping the speech perception capacity.

The acquisition of lexical tones in infancy and earlychildhood.
Leher SinghNational University of Singapore, Singapore
For the most part, research on how infants and children master their native
sound system has focused on Indo-European languages. This has resulted ina skew towards researching the properties of these languages, which aretypically consonant and vowel systems. Lexical tones are highly frequentphonological properties of other languages, such as Mandarin Chinese,
which are widely spoken around the world. I will present research from mylaboratory investigating the acquisition of tonal systems, drawing from
infant speech perception, word learning, familiar word recognition, andrecognition of words amidst context-cued variation. Results from each ofthese areas point to a developmental trajectory for tone acquisition that islargely asynchronous with trajectories established for English and otherwidely studied languages.

The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis: Howchildren bootstrap themselves from multi-sensory
mapping to language-specific linguistic systems.
Mutsumi Imai
Keio Univesity, JapanSound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relation between speech sounds andmeanings. Recently, sound symbolism has attracted researchers’ attention as
it seems to be connected to various important issues central to humancognition and language, including cross-modal mappings, synesthesia,
language development and evolution.In this talk, Ipropose the soundsymbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, which claims that (1) pre-verbal
infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, with a biologically endowed ability
to map and integrate multi-modal input; (2) sound symbolism helps infants
to gain the referential insight for speech sounds; (3) sound symbolism helps
infants and toddlers associate speech sounds and their referents and toestablish a lexical representation; and (4) sound symbolism helps toddlers
learn words by helping them to focus on referents embedded in a complex
scene. I present evidence for each of these claims through a series ofbehavioural and neurological studies with infants, toddlers and adults. I
then discuss how children de-ground from direct iconicity and immerse into
conventional language, which is a system of abstract symbols and does notcontain apparently sensible sound symbolism.

Babytalk is not always WEIRD: Distinct acoustic
characteristics of infant-versus adult-directed speech in
Lenakel (Austronesian) and English (Indo-European).
[Elise McClay, Senay Cebioglu, Tanya Broesch, & Henny Yeung]

Henny Yeung
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Many acoustic aspects of infant-directed speech (IDS) are thought to be
distinct from adult-directed speech (ADS). For example, IDS vowels havebeen reported to be slower overall, breathier, higher in terms of pitch andpitch variability, more spectrally variable (both within- and between-tokens),and hyper-articulated (among other differences). A limitation of that work isthat IDS research has traditionally been limited to WEIRD contexts(Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Research on
Asian languages has also been largely limited to -EIRD populations, evenwhilesamplingfrom

historicallyunderstudied(non-Indo-European)

language families. Here we report a comparative IDS-ADS study of English(spoken in the Vancouver, Canada metropolitan area) and Lenakel (anOceanic dialect chain primarily spoken on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu),
which samples from WEIRD and non-WEIRD populations, respectively. An
analysis of vowels from controlled phonetic contexts suggests that most
IDS-ADS differences that occur in English do not occur in Lenakel. Only
pitch-related differences were observed across WEIRD and non-WEIRD
contexts (i.e., pitch was higher and more variable in the IDS of bothlanguages). This raises fundamental questions about which characteristics ofIDS are universal, and which may be language-/culture-specific.

Acoustic characteristics of motherese and early
perceptual development: A case study of Japanese stops.
[Hyun Kyung Hwang, Mieko Takada, Reiko Mazuka]

Hyun Kyung Hwang
University of Tsukuba, JapanInfants must acquire the ability to discriminate contrastive sounds in alanguage. If the input for infants involves ongoing sound changes, one of thechallenges infants encounter can be varying cues across generations.
Interestingly, a change-in-progress of laryngeal contrasts is reported inJapanese voiced stops—the lack of pre-voicing among younger speakers. Itraises an interesting question whether this change is reflected in maternal
input, or mothers still exhibit pre-voicing prevalently when they talk to theirinfants to enhance the laryngeal contrast. What are the implications of thechanges if infants’ speech development is closely linked to sound changes in
the maternal input?
To explore the acoustic characteristics of infant-directed speech (IDS), thisstudy explored two different types of speech data: lab speech & spontaneousspeech. The results of acoustic analyses revealed that mothers spread theinnovation in initial stops rather than facilitating the perceptual
development of infants. Also, the quite adjacent distribution of two stop
categories suggests difficulties in discriminating the voicing contrast. Thus,
Japanese-learning infants aged 5 and 9 months old were tested using thevisual habituation method. The results of the behavioral study confirm thatthe development of Japanese voicing perception is acquired relatively late,highlighting the weak discriminability of stop contrast due to the ongoingsound change in maternal input.

Phonetic modifications of Thai stops' voice-onset-time,
vowel duration, and lexical tones in infant-directedspeech.
Chutamanee Onsuwan
Thammasat University, Thailand
A large body of research has shown that some phonetic features are
significantly modified in infant-directed speech (IDS) comparing withadult-directed speech. However, differences in terms of types (i.e., duration,formant frequency) and degrees (i.e., neutral, hypo, and hyper articulatedspeech) have been noted across studies of various languages. This talkpresents acoustic results which show that segmental (stop and vowel) andsupra-segmental (lexical tone) units in IDS are not necessarily modified
equally within the same language (Thai). Speech materials were taken frominteractions between mother and her child and with an experimenter usinglabeled toys. There were 14 Thai mother-child dyads across two groups ofinfants (4-6 and 8-10 months olds) in Experiment 1, where mean F0, pitch
range, time-normalized F0 contours (mid, low, falling, high, and rising), andduration of vocalic portions were extracted from 700 tokens. In Experiment 2,
there were 15 mother-child dyads across three groups (4-6, 8-10, and 11-13
months olds). Durational measures were taken from nearly 430 tokens forstops (/b/, /p/, and /ph/) and the following vowel. Overall findings showed that,
unlike supra-segmental and vocalic aspects of IDS which were associatedwith relatively significant degrees of hyper-articulation, the VOT aspect
failed to show this pattern.

Learning the tones of Mandarin: Acoustic evidence fromchildren with cochlear implants.
[Tang, P., Xu Rattanasone, N., Yuen, I., Gao, L., & Demuth, K. (in press). The
acquisition of Mandarin tonal processes by children with cochlear implants.

Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.]

Katherine Demuth
Macquarie University, Australia
Recent research has shown that, by the age of 3, Mandarin-speaking
children have acquired adult-like acoustic representations for the 4 tonal
contrasts (Tang et al., 2019). But tones are known to be a challenge for deaf
children who are fitted with cochlear implants (CIs), since these devices are
not good at transmitting pitch. This study investigated the acoustic
realization of Mandarin-speaking children fitted with CIs. The findings
reveal that those implanted before the age of two can approach tonal acoustic
values similar to those of their normal hearing peers, but that this isespecially true for those with longer CI experience. However, even if they canproduce lexical tones, the comprehension of tones presents a challenge. Thissuggests that early implantation, and longer CI experience may be needed
for these learners to be able to use tonal information during language
processing.