Barbara Höhle
Biographic Data
| ID | 1453894 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barbara Höhle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barbara |
| FAMILY NAME | Höhle |
| SIGNATURE | HÖHLE B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Potsdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9240-6117 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Distributional learning beyond perceptual reorganization: Enhanced discrimination in children and adults after bimodal training
Infants and adults use statistical information from the speech input to form phonetic categories. This ability has been shown by numerous experiments presenting the participants with either a bimodal or a unimodal distribution of sounds from an acoustic continuum. However, this ability seems to decrease across the first year of life in parallel with infants’ establishment of the native language phonetic categories. So far, it is unclear whether t…
Use of Statistical and Acoustic Cues for Speech Segmentation in French-Learning 7-Month-Old Infants and French-Speaking Adults
Young infants can segment continuous speech with acoustic as well as statistical cues. Understanding how these cues interact can be informative about how infants solve the segmentation problem. This study investigates the use of acoustic and statistical cues by both adult French speakers and 6-to-7-month-old French-learning infants. Both groups were familiarized with a naturally recorded string, alternating either in duration (long-short) or in i…
Neural correlates of lexical-tone and vowel-quality processing in 6- and 9-month-old German-learning infants and adults
We examined the neurophysiological underpinnings of lexical-tone and vowel-quality perception in learners of a non-tonal language. We tested 25 6- and 25 9-month-old German-learning infants, as well as 24 German adults and expected developmental differences for the two linguistic properties, as they are both carried by vowels, but have a different status in German. In adults, both lexical-tone and vowel-quality contrasts elicited mismatch negativ…
Infant preference for specific phonetic cue relations in the contrast between voiced and voiceless stops
Acoustic variability in the speech input has been shown, in certain contexts, to be beneficial during infants' acquisition of sound contrasts. One approach attributes this result to the potential of variability to make the stability of individual cues visible. Another approach suggests that, instead of highlighting individual cues, variability uncovers stable relations between cues that signal a sound contrast. Here, we investigate the relation b…
Rhythm Perception in Speakers of Arabic, German and Hebrew
Rhythm perception in speech and non-speech acoustic stimuli has been shown to be affected by general acoustic biases as well as by phonological properties of the native language of the listener. The present paper extends the cross-linguistic approach in this field by testing the application of the iambic-trochaic law as an assumed general acoustic bias on rhythmic grouping of non-speech stimuli by speakers of three languages: Arabic, Hebrew and G…
Speech Segmentation with Prosodic and Statistical Cues Is Language-Specific in Infancy
Speech segmentation is one of the first tasks infants face when learning their mother tongue. It has been argued that statistical learning could function as a gateway to speech segmentation in the absence of pre-existing knowledge about the language to be acquired. However, infants also segment speech with prosodic cues, such as lexical stress. Here, we review recent evidence from studies that look at how infants weigh statistical and prosodic in…
Differences in the interplay of face and speech processing in 5-year-olds and adults
The current study examined to what extent face and speech processing interact with each other and whether they enhance or impair the processing of the other in 5-year-olds ( n = 51) and adults ( n = 34). Using a computer-based speeded sorting task allowed to directly test the influence of auditory speech on face processing and the influence of face identity on auditory speech processing within one experiment. Participants were asked to either sor…
Prosody outweighs statistics in 6‐month‐old German‐learning infants' speech segmentation
It is well established that infants use various cues to find words within fluent speech from about 7 to 8 months of age. Research suggests that two main mechanisms support infants' speech segmentation: prosodic cues like the word stress patterns, and distributional cues like transitional probabilities (TPs). We tested 6‐month‐old German‐learning infants' use of prosodic and statistical cues for speech segmentation in three experiments. In Experim…
Asymmetries in Infants’ Vowel Perception: Changes in Vowel Discrimination in German Learning 6- and 9-Month-Old Infants
Infants’ speech perception is characterized by substantial changes during the first year of life that attune the processing mechanisms to the specific properties of the ambient language. This paper focuses on these developmental changes in vowel perception. More specifically, the emergence and potential cause of perceptual asymmetries in vowel perception are investigated by an experimental study on German 6- and 9-month-olds’ discrimination of a …
Pupillary entrainment reveals individual differences in cue weighting in 9-month-old German-learning infants
Acquiring Syntactic Variability: The Production of Wh-Questions in Children and Adults Speaking Akan
This paper investigates the predictions of the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis by studying the acquisition of wh -questions in 4- and 5-year-old Akan-speaking children in an experimental approach using an elicited production and an elicited imitation task. Akan has two types of wh -question structures ( wh -in-situ and wh -ex-situ questions), which allows an investigation of children’s acquisition of these two question structures and their pre…
Rhythmic grouping biases in simultaneous bilinguals
This study provides a novel approach for testing the universality of perceptual biases by looking at speech processing in simultaneous bilingual adults learning two languages that support the maintenance of this bias to different degrees. Specifically, we investigated the Iambic/Trochaic Law, an assumed universal grouping bias, in simultaneous French–German bilinguals, presenting them with streams of syllables varying in intensity, duration or ne…
Language-specific prosodic acquisition: A comparison of phrase boundary perception by French- and German-learning infants
Children's online use of word order and morphosyntactic markers in Tagalog thematic role assignment: An eye-tracking study
We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they heard, while their looks to the pictures were tracked. Accuracy and eye-tracking data showed that agent…
Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference
Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) as…
Children's gradient sensitivity to phonological mismatch: Considering the dynamics of looking behavior and pupil dilation
In a preferential looking paradigm, we studied how children's looking behavior and pupillary response were modulated by the degree of phonological mismatch between the correct label of a target referent and its manipulated form. We manipulated degree of mismatch by introducing one or more featural changes to the target label. Both looking behavior and pupillary response were sensitive to degree of mismatch, corroborating previous studies that fou…
Understanding Prosodic Focus Marking in Mandarin Chinese: Data from Children and Adults
Four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in focus marking in Dutch
This study investigated Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in distinguishing focus types (broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive narrow focus) via an interactive answer-reconstruction game. We have found an overall preference for the unmarked word order SVO and no evidence for the use of OVS to distinguish focus types. But the children used pitch and duration in the subject-nouns to distinguish focus types i…
Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds
Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of su…
Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children
This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, des…
Infants’ Processing of Prosodic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Boundary Perception beyond Pause Detection
Infants as young as six months are sensitive to prosodic phrase boundaries marked by three acoustic cues: pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. Behavioral studies suggest that a language-specific weighting of these cues develops during the first year of life; recent work on German revealed that eight-month-olds, unlike six-month-olds, are capable of perceiving a prosodic boundary on the basis of pitch change and final lengthening only. The …
Investigating auditory processing of syntactic gaps with L2 speakers using pupillometry
According to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), second language (L2) speakers, unlike native speakers, build shallow syntactic representations during sentence processing. In order to test the SSH, this study investigated the processing of a syntactic movement in both native speakers of English and proficient late L2 speakers of English using pupillometry to measure processing cost. Of particular interest were constructions where movement res…
Prosodic boundary cues in German: Evidence from the production and perception of bracketed lists
Effects of focus and definiteness on children's word order: Evidence from German five-year-olds' reproductions of double object constructions
Two experiments tested how faithfully German children aged 4 ;5 to 5 ;6 reproduce ditransitive sentences that are unmarked or marked with respect to word order and focus (Exp1) or definiteness (Exp2). Adopting an optimality theory (OT) approach, it is assumed that in the German adult grammar word order is ranked lower than focus and definiteness. Faithfulness of children's reproductions decreased as markedness of inputs increased; unmarked struct…
Discrimination of Rhythmic Pattern at 4 Months and Language Performance at 5 Years: A Longitudinal Analysis of Data From German-Learning Children
In this article we report on early rhythmic discrimination performance of children who participated in a longitudinal study following children from birth to their 6th year of life. Thirty-four children including 8 children with a family risk for developmental language impairment were tested on the discrimination of trochaic and iambic disyllabic sequences when they were 4 months old. At 5 years of age, standardized measures on language performanc…
Prosodic boundary cues in German: Evidence from the production and perception of bracketed lists
What asymmetries within comprehension reveal about asymmetries between comprehension and production: The case of verb inflection in language acquisition
Investigating auditory processing of syntactic gaps with L2 speakers using pupillometry
According to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), second language (L2) speakers, unlike native speakers, build shallow syntactic representations during sentence processing. In order to test the SSH, this study investigated the processing of a syntactic movement in both native speakers of English and proficient late L2 speakers of English using pupillometry to measure processing cost. Of particular interest were constructions where movement res…
Discrimination of Rhythmic Pattern at 4 Months and Language Performance at 5 Years: A Longitudinal Analysis of Data From German-Learning Children
In this article we report on early rhythmic discrimination performance of children who participated in a longitudinal study following children from birth to their 6th year of life. Thirty-four children including 8 children with a family risk for developmental language impairment were tested on the discrimination of trochaic and iambic disyllabic sequences when they were 4 months old. At 5 years of age, standardized measures on language performanc…
The detection of subject-verb agreement violations by German-speaking children: An eye-tracking study
Bootstrapping mechanisms in first language acquisition
In the field of language acquisition the term bootstrapping stands for the assumption that the child is genetically equipped with a specific program to get the process of language acquisition started. Originally set within the principles and parameters framework bootstrapping mechanism are considered as a linkage between properties of the specific language the child is exposed to and pre-existing linguistic knowledge provided by universal grammar…
Aphasie und Sprachproduktion
Das vorliegende Buch ist eine leicht überarbeitete Fassung memer Dissertation, die ich im Juni 1992 am Fachbereich Germanistik der Freien Universität Berlin eingereicht habe. Die umfangreiche Datenerh
Aphasie und Sprachproduktion: Sprachstörungen bei Broca- und Wernicke-Aphasikern
Approaches to Bootstrapping: Phonological, lexical, syntactic and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisitionVolume 1
Volume 1 of Approaches to Bootstrapping focuses on early word learning and syntactic development with special emphasis on the bootstrapping mechanisms by which the child using properties of the speech input enters the native linguistic system. Topics discussed in the area of lexical acquisition are: cues and mechanisms for isolating words in the input; special features of motherese and their role for early word learning; the determination of firs…
Approaches to bootstrapping: Phonological, Lexical, Syntactic and Neuro- Physiological Aspects of Early Language Acquisition
Functional Elements in Infants' Speech Processing: The Role of Determiners in the Syntactic Categorization of Lexical Elements
How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head‐turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12‐ to 13‐month‐olds cannot do this, …
Information structural constraints on children’s early language production: The acquisition of the focus particle auch (‘also’) in German-learning 12- to 36-month-olds
This article presents new findings for the acquisition of the focus particle auch (‘also’) in German-learning children. In a longitudinal study with 11 children between 1;00 and 3;00 years of age complemented by two experiments with children aged 2;4 and 2;8, the authors investigated children’s production of the accented and unaccented auch. The results confirm earlier findings of a temporal delay between the first occurrences of both auch-varian…
Bootstrapping mechanisms in first language acquisition
In the field of language acquisition the term bootstrapping stands for the assumption that the child is genetically equipped with a specific program to get the process of language acquisition started. Originally set within the principles and parameters framework bootstrapping mechanism are considered as a linkage between properties of the specific language the child is exposed to and pre-existing linguistic knowledge provided by universal grammar…
What asymmetries within comprehension reveal about asymmetries between comprehension and production: The case of verb inflection in language acquisition
Psycholinguistik
Kernfragen und Methoden: Was befähigt den Menschen zum Erwerb und Gebrauch einer Sprache? Wie lässt sich das erforschen? - Wissensstrukturen und kognitive Prozesse: Sprachwahrnehmung, Produktion und Verstehen von Wörtern und Sätzen - Wie kommt das Kind zur Sprache? Schritte des Erstspracherwerbs, kognitive und soziale Voraussetzungen - Sprache und Gehirn: Repräsentation von Sprache im Gehirn, Mehrsprachigkeit, Hirnschädigungen und Sprachstörungen…
Restrictions on addition: Children's interpretation of the focus particles auch ‘also’ and nur ‘only’ in German
Children up to school age have been reported to perform poorly when interpreting sentences containing restrictive and additive focus particles by treating sentences with a focus particle in the same way as sentences without it. Careful comparisons between results of previous studies indicate that this phenomenon is less pronounced for restrictive than for additive particles. We argue that this asymmetry is an effect of the presuppositional status…
Aphasie und Sprachproduktion: Sprachstörungen Bei Broca- und Wernicke-Aphasikern
Verb inflection in German-learning children with typical and atypical language acquisition: The impact of subsyllabic frequencies
Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production of inflected nonce verb forms (3 rd person sin…
Effects of focus and definiteness on children's word order: Evidence from German five-year-olds' reproductions of double object constructions
Two experiments tested how faithfully German children aged 4 ;5 to 5 ;6 reproduce ditransitive sentences that are unmarked or marked with respect to word order and focus (Exp1) or definiteness (Exp2). Adopting an optimality theory (OT) approach, it is assumed that in the German adult grammar word order is ranked lower than focus and definiteness. Faithfulness of children's reproductions decreased as markedness of inputs increased; unmarked struct…
Discrimination of Rhythmic Pattern at 4 Months and Language Performance at 5 Years: A Longitudinal Analysis of Data From German-Learning Children
In this article we report on early rhythmic discrimination performance of children who participated in a longitudinal study following children from birth to their 6th year of life. Thirty-four children including 8 children with a family risk for developmental language impairment were tested on the discrimination of trochaic and iambic disyllabic sequences when they were 4 months old. At 5 years of age, standardized measures on language performanc…
The detection of subject-verb agreement violations by German-speaking children: An eye-tracking study
Investigating auditory processing of syntactic gaps with L2 speakers using pupillometry
According to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), second language (L2) speakers, unlike native speakers, build shallow syntactic representations during sentence processing. In order to test the SSH, this study investigated the processing of a syntactic movement in both native speakers of English and proficient late L2 speakers of English using pupillometry to measure processing cost. Of particular interest were constructions where movement res…
Prosodic boundary cues in German: Evidence from the production and perception of bracketed lists
Four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in focus marking in Dutch
This study investigated Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in distinguishing focus types (broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive narrow focus) via an interactive answer-reconstruction game. We have found an overall preference for the unmarked word order SVO and no evidence for the use of OVS to distinguish focus types. But the children used pitch and duration in the subject-nouns to distinguish focus types i…
Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds
Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of su…
Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children
This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, des…
Infants’ Processing of Prosodic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Boundary Perception beyond Pause Detection
Infants as young as six months are sensitive to prosodic phrase boundaries marked by three acoustic cues: pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. Behavioral studies suggest that a language-specific weighting of these cues develops during the first year of life; recent work on German revealed that eight-month-olds, unlike six-month-olds, are capable of perceiving a prosodic boundary on the basis of pitch change and final lengthening only. The …
Children's gradient sensitivity to phonological mismatch: Considering the dynamics of looking behavior and pupil dilation
In a preferential looking paradigm, we studied how children's looking behavior and pupillary response were modulated by the degree of phonological mismatch between the correct label of a target referent and its manipulated form. We manipulated degree of mismatch by introducing one or more featural changes to the target label. Both looking behavior and pupillary response were sensitive to degree of mismatch, corroborating previous studies that fou…
Understanding Prosodic Focus Marking in Mandarin Chinese: Data from Children and Adults
Rhythmic grouping biases in simultaneous bilinguals
This study provides a novel approach for testing the universality of perceptual biases by looking at speech processing in simultaneous bilingual adults learning two languages that support the maintenance of this bias to different degrees. Specifically, we investigated the Iambic/Trochaic Law, an assumed universal grouping bias, in simultaneous French–German bilinguals, presenting them with streams of syllables varying in intensity, duration or ne…
Language-specific prosodic acquisition: A comparison of phrase boundary perception by French- and German-learning infants
Linguistics (29 works) · Psychology (29 works) · Language Development and Disorders (26 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · German (16 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (16 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (15 works) · Cognitive psychology (14 works) · Artificial Intelligence (13 works) · Perception (9 works)