Jacques Mehler
Biographic Data
| ID | 757182 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jacques Mehler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jacques |
| FAMILY NAME | Mehler |
| SIGNATURE | MEHLER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1964 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Twelve to 24-month-olds can understand the meaning of morphological regularities in their language
To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build links between these other parts of language and their meaning. Here, we investigated the acquisition…
Bias for Vocalic Over Consonantal Information in 6‐Month‐Olds
Human languages rely on the ability to learn and produce an indefinite number of words by combining consonants and vowels in a lawful manner. The categorization of speech representations into consonants and vowels is evidenced by the tendency of adult speakers, attested in many languages, to use consonants and vowels for different tasks. Consonants are favored in lexical tasks, while vowels are favored to learn structural regularities. Recent res…
Statistical Speech Segmentation in Tone Languages
Research has demonstrated distinct roles for consonants and vowels in speech processing. For example, consonants have been shown to support lexical processes, such as the segmentation of speech based on transitional probabilities (TPs), more effectively than vowels. Theory and data so far, however, have considered only non-tone languages, that is to say, languages that lack contrastive lexical tones. In the present work, we provide a first invest…
An Advantage for Perceptual Edges in Young Infants' Memory for Speech
Models of language acquisition are constrained by the information that learners can extract from their input. Experiment 1 investigated whether 3-month-old infants are able to encode a repeated, unsegmented sequence of five syllables. Event-related-potentials showed that infants reacted to a change of the initial or the final syllable, but not to a change of the third, internal, syllable. The information carried by the internal constituents of a …
Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants
Children exposed to bilingual input typically learn 2 languages without obvious difficulties. However, it is unclear how preverbal infants cope with the inconsistent input and how bilingualism affects early development. In 3 eye-tracking studies we show that 7-month-old infants, raised with 2 languages from birth, display improved cognitive control abilities compared with matched monolinguals. Whereas both monolinguals and bilinguals learned to r…
Finding Words and Rules in a Speech Stream
We have proposed that consonants give cues primarily about the lexicon, whereas vowels carry cues about syntax. In a study supporting this hypothesis, we showed that when segmenting words from an artificial continuous stream, participants compute statistical relations over consonants, but not over vowels. In the study reported here, we tested the symmetrical hypothesis that when participants listen to words in a speech stream, they tend to exploi…
What Infants Know and What They have to Learn about Language
The study of language acquisition during the first year of life is reviewed. We identified three areas that have contributed to our understanding of how the infant copes with linguistic signals to attain the most basic properties of its native language. Distributional properties present in the incoming utterances may allow infants to extract word candidates in the speech stream as shown in the impoverished conditions of artificial grammar studies…
An interaction between prosody and statistics in the segmentation of fluent speech
Linguistic Constraints on Statistical Computations
Speech is produced mainly in continuous streams containing several words. Listeners can use the transitional probability (TP) between adjacent and non-adjacent syllables to segment "words" from a continuous stream of artificial speech, much as they use TPs to organize a variety of perceptual continua. It is thus possible that a general-purpose statistical device exploits any speech unit to achieve segmentation of speech streams. Alternatively, la…
Phonological phrase boundaries constrain lexical access I. Adult data
The role of speech rhythm in language discrimination
Human newborns discriminate languages from different rhythmic classes, fail to discriminate languages from the same rhythmic class, and fail to discriminate languages when the utterances are played backwards. Recent evidence showing that cotton-top tamarins discriminate Dutch from Japanese, but not when utterances are played backwards, is compatible with the hypothesis that rhythm discrimination is based on a general perceptual mechanism inherite…
Signal-Driven Computations in Speech Processing
Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebraic-like computations to discover higher level (grammatical) structure. Here we show that these computations can be influenced by subtle cues in the speech signal. After a short familiarization to a continuous speech stream, adult listeners are able to segment it using powerful statistics, but they fail to extract the structural regularities included …
The Human First Hypothesis
Perception of Prosodic Boundary Correlates by Newborn Infants
French newborn infants were shown to perceive acoustic correlates of phonological phrase boundaries in Spanish, with stress‐controlled stimuli. Access to phonological phrase boundaries may facilitate the acquisition of a lexicon, as well as some aspects of phonology and even syntax
Epenthetic vowels in Japanese
In four cross-linguistic experiments comparing French and Japanese hearers, we found that the phonotactic properties of Japanese (very reduced set of syllable types) induce Japanese listeners to perceive ``illusory'' vowels inside consonant clusters in VCCV stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used a continuum of stimuli ranging from no vowel (e.g. ebzo) to a full vowel between the consonants (e.g. ebuzo). Japanese, but not French participants, re…
Signed and Spoken Language
Sign language has only recently become a topic of investigation in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. In this paper, we review research from these two fields; in particular, we compare spoken and signed language by looking at data concerning either cortical representations or early acquisition. As to cognitive neuroscience, we show that clinical neuropsychological data regarding sign language is partially inconsistent with imaging data…
Language discrimination by newborns
Where Is the Length Effect? A Cross-Linguistic Study of Speech Production
A Destressing “Deafness” in French
Morae and Syllables
Are neonates sensitive to the different rhythmical units that are used in different spoken languages? And do they use these units to represent and discriminate multisyllabic words? In the present study, we used the High-Amplitude Sucking procedure to test whether 3-day-old French infants discriminate lists of Japanese words. The lists of words differed either in the number of syllabic units or in the number of sub-syllabic units such as morae. In…
Attentional Allocation within the Syllabic Structure of Spoken Words
Mora or Syllable? Speech Segmentation in Japanese
How do 4-day-old infants categorize multisyllabic utterances
Three experiments, using the high-amplitude sucking procedure, tested whether 4-day-old infants discriminate multisyllabic utterances on the basis of number of syllables or number of phonemes. Experiment 1 showed that infants discriminate 2 large sets of phonetically variable utterances composed of 2- vs. 3-CV (consonant-vowel) syllables. Experiment 2 was run to assess whether infants discriminated the 2 sets on the basis of duration differences …
The periodicity bias
The monolingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals
Linguistic Constraints on Statistical Computations
Speech is produced mainly in continuous streams containing several words. Listeners can use the transitional probability (TP) between adjacent and non-adjacent syllables to segment "words" from a continuous stream of artificial speech, much as they use TPs to organize a variety of perceptual continua. It is thus possible that a general-purpose statistical device exploits any speech unit to achieve segmentation of speech streams. Alternatively, la…
How do 4-day-old infants categorize multisyllabic utterances
Three experiments, using the high-amplitude sucking procedure, tested whether 4-day-old infants discriminate multisyllabic utterances on the basis of number of syllables or number of phonemes. Experiment 1 showed that infants discriminate 2 large sets of phonetically variable utterances composed of 2- vs. 3-CV (consonant-vowel) syllables. Experiment 2 was run to assess whether infants discriminated the 2 sets on the basis of duration differences …
The periodicity bias
Statistical Speech Segmentation in Tone Languages
Research has demonstrated distinct roles for consonants and vowels in speech processing. For example, consonants have been shown to support lexical processes, such as the segmentation of speech based on transitional probabilities (TPs), more effectively than vowels. Theory and data so far, however, have considered only non-tone languages, that is to say, languages that lack contrastive lexical tones. In the present work, we provide a first invest…
Phoneme monitoring, syllable monitoring and lexical access
In this experiment we investigated the role of the lexical status (word/non-word) of the target item in the determination of phoneme and syllable detection times. Subjects monitored either the initial stop consonants (/b/, /d/, /p/) or the initial CV syllables (/ba/, /de/, /pi/) in bisyllabic target items (word/non-word) in mixed lists. The lexical status of the target item did not introduce significant differences for phoneme or syllable detecti…
Signed and Spoken Language
Sign language has only recently become a topic of investigation in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. In this paper, we review research from these two fields; in particular, we compare spoken and signed language by looking at data concerning either cortical representations or early acquisition. As to cognitive neuroscience, we show that clinical neuropsychological data regarding sign language is partially inconsistent with imaging data…
De la psychologie à la science cognitive
Retroactive Interference in the Recall of Simple Sentences
A list of English sentences was learned by the method of free recall. Performance was scored both for sentences recalled precisely and for sentences recalled in content regardless of their syntactic form. Interpolated lists of sentences differing from the original list in syntactic details or in semantic form were used to produce retroactive inhibition (RI). The RI for semantic content was negligible; when the interpolated list differed only in s…
Rôle de la structure profonde et de la structure de surface dans la perception des phrases
Mehler Jacques, Carey P., Dubois-Charlier Françoise. Rôle de la structure profonde et de la structure de surface dans la perception des phrases. In: Langages, 4e année, n°16, 1969. Psycholinguistique et grammaire générative, sous la direction de Jacques Mehler. pp. 106-110
Strategies for sentence perception
The syllable's role in speech segmentation
The Role of the Syllable in Language Acquisition and Perception
Phoneme monitoring, syllable monitoring and lexical access
In this experiment we investigated the role of the lexical status (word/non-word) of the target item in the determination of phoneme and syllable detection times. Subjects monitored either the initial stop consonants (/b/, /d/, /p/) or the initial CV syllables (/ba/, /de/, /pi/) in bisyllabic target items (word/non-word) in mixed lists. The lexical status of the target item did not introduce significant differences for phoneme or syllable detecti…
Le Développement dans la première année
The syllable's differing role in the segmentation of French and English
English and French Speech Processing
The word frequency effect for open- and closed-class items
A previous attempt (Segui, Mehler, Frauenfelder,&Morton, 1982) to assess in French the putative computational asymmetry between open- and closed-class words failed to reveal a difference in frequency sensitivity for these two types of words. In the present paper, two further lexical decision experiments are presented. The experimental conditions were chosen to maximise the chances of finding differences in frequency sensitivity between the two wo…
Phoneme identification and the lexicon
De la psychologie à la science cognitive
A precursor of language acquisition in young infants
Literacy and the Brain
Agrammatism in sentence production without comprehension deficits
Dichotic perception and laterality in neonates
The role of attention in speech perception by young infants
Monitoring the lexicon with normal and compressed speech
The monolingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals
Attentional Allocation within the Syllabic Structure of Spoken Words
Mora or Syllable? Speech Segmentation in Japanese
How do 4-day-old infants categorize multisyllabic utterances
Three experiments, using the high-amplitude sucking procedure, tested whether 4-day-old infants discriminate multisyllabic utterances on the basis of number of syllables or number of phonemes. Experiment 1 showed that infants discriminate 2 large sets of phonetically variable utterances composed of 2- vs. 3-CV (consonant-vowel) syllables. Experiment 2 was run to assess whether infants discriminated the 2 sets on the basis of duration differences …
The periodicity bias
Morae and Syllables
Are neonates sensitive to the different rhythmical units that are used in different spoken languages? And do they use these units to represent and discriminate multisyllabic words? In the present study, we used the High-Amplitude Sucking procedure to test whether 3-day-old French infants discriminate lists of Japanese words. The lists of words differed either in the number of syllabic units or in the number of sub-syllabic units such as morae. In…
A Destressing “Deafness” in French
Psychology (41 works) · Linguistics (33 works) · Computer Science (27 works) · Cognitive psychology (23 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (21 works) · Language Development and Disorders (20 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (17 works) · Speech recognition (17 works) · Artificial Intelligence (15 works) · Natural language processing (13 works)