{"pk":25946,"title":"Vocabulary Size is Correlated with Non-Native Tone Sensitivity In English\nLearning Infants","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In many languages, tone (i.e., pitch patterns) is part of the phonological system; two words with the same sequences\nof segments can differ only in tone. Tone does not distinguish word meanings in English, so English-learning infants can\nignore tone when learning words, but do they? We examined the encoding of tonal detail in word learning by monolingual\nEnglish-learning 14- and 17-month-olds. Infants were habituated to a novel word with a Mandarin tone (/k´a/) paired with a\nnovel object. Test trials alternated between the same pairing (Same), and the same object paired with the word with a different\ntone (/k`a/, Switch). Longer looks to the unfamiliar mapping indicate infants noticed the switch and attended to tone contrasts.\nOverall, neither age group discriminated the tone contrast; however, infants with larger vocabularies looked longer to the novel\nmapping (r=.32, p=.007), suggesting a common underlying mechanism between general word learning and tone sensitivity.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/37z455q0","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Candise","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lin","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""},{"first_name":"Toben","middle_name":"","last_name":"Mintz","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25946/galley/15570/download/"}]}