European Portuguese (EP) is a language with variable stress, and the main cues for stress are duration and vowel reduction. Previous behavioral study has reported a stress “deafness” effect in EP when vowel quality cues are unavailable. The present study recorded both event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data to examine the stress processing by native EP speakers in the absence of the vowel quality cues. Our behavioral result was consistent with previous research, showing that when vowel reduction is absent EP (...) speakers demonstrated a stress “deafness” effect similar to that found in speakers of languages with fixed stress or without any lexical stress marking. In the ERP task, both the trochaic and iambic conditions yielded mismatch negativity (MMN) and late negativity, suggesting that EP speakers are able to discriminate the two stress patterns without vowel reduction at the pre-attentive stage. Moreover, the ERP and behavioral data revealed compatible results regarding the pattern of stress bias in EP. In the EPR task, the MMN and late negativity components were more negative and span over a larger temporal window in the iambic condition than in the trochaic condition, indicating a higher sensitivity for the iambic stress pattern. In the behavioral task, EP speakers responded more accurately and more quickly to the iambic stress. These results match recent developmental findings in the acquisition of stress, but speak against the dominant view in EP phonological literature which assumes penultimate stress to be the regular stress pattern. In addition, both the ERP and the behavioral data showed that EP speakers’ stress processing was influenced by their working memory (WM) capacity. The participants with high WM capacity outperformed the participants with limited WM capacity in the iambic condition. In sum, our results broaden the current knowledge on stress processing by EP speakers at both the pre-attentive and attentive levels. (shrink)

As children with Down syndrome (DS) typically manifest significant delays in language development, the research has pointed out the predictors of later language skills for this clinical population. The purpose of this study was to systematically explore the evidence for early predictors of language outcomes in infants and toddlers with DS from studies published between 2012 and 2022. After the search, nine studies met the inclusion criteria. The results indicated that maternal educational level, adaptive level of functioning, cognitive function, attention (...) skills, communicative intent of the child, early vocalizations, gestures, baby signs, parents’ translation of their children’s gestures into words, and vocabulary level are significant predictors of language outcomes in children with DS. These findings provide a timely and warranted summary of published work that contributes to current understanding of the development of language and communication in DS. They are therefore useful to researchers, clinicians, and families. (shrink)

Infants have been shown to rely both on auditory and visual cues when processing speech. We investigated the impact of COVID-related changes, in particular of face masks, in early word segmentation abilities. Following up on our previous study demonstrating that, by 4 months, infants already segmented targets presented auditorily at utterance-edge position, and, using the same visual familiarization paradigm, 7–9-month-old infants performed an auditory and an audiovisual word segmentation experiment in two conditions: without and with an FFP2 face mask. Analysis (...) of acoustic and visual cues showed changes in face-masked speech affecting the amount, weight, and location of cues. Utterance-edge position displayed more salient cues than utterance-medial position, but the cues were attenuated in face-masked speech. Results revealed no evidence for segmentation, not even at edge position, regardless of mask condition and auditory or visual speech presentation. However, in the audiovisual experiment, infants attended more to the screen during the test trials when familiarized with without mask speech. Also, the infants attended more to the mouth and less to the eyes in without mask than with mask. In addition, evidence for an advantage of the utterance-edge position in emerging segmentation abilities was found. Thus, audiovisual information provided some support to developing word segmentation. We compared 7–9-monthers segmentation ability observed in the Butler and Frota pre-COVID study with the current auditory without mask data. Mean looking time for edge was significantly higher than unfamiliar in the pre-COVID study only. Measures of cognitive and language development obtained with the CSBS scales showed that the infants of the current study scored significantly lower than the same-age infants from the CSBS normative data. Our results suggest an overall effect of the pandemic on early segmentation abilities and language development, calling for longitudinal studies to determine how development proceeds. (shrink)