Language experience 'narrows' speech perception by the end of infants' first year, reducing discrimination of non-native phoneme contrasts while improving native-contrast discrimination. Previous research showed that declines in non-native discrimination were reversed by second-language experience provided at 9-10 months, but it is not known whether second-language experience affects first-lang...

This paper discusses a series of so-called “elicitation” games that encourage children to talk in a situation that is as natural and relaxed as possible. Such games have played a central role in language teaching and speech therapy, where they have been employed to provide language training or to assess children’s linguistic development without putting them under stress. Recently, such games ha...

Speech corpus is the backbone of an Automatic speech Recognition system. This paper presents the development of speech corpora for different speech recognition tasks in Malayalam language. Pronunciation dictionary and Transcription file which are the other two essential resources for building a speech recognizer are also being created. Speech recognition performance of different speech recognit...

The article discusses the methodological potential of fiction in developing professional and communicative competencies of Hospitality students based on interdisciplinary approach. The study focuses on the most actual aspects of speech culture and describes the ways of developing professionally oriented communicative competencies and the basics of professional speech training of bachelors in th...

During the first year of life, infants pass important milestones in language development. We review some of the experimental evidence concerning these milestones in the domains of speech perception, phonological development, word learning, morphosyntactic acquisition, and bilingualism, emphasizing their interactions. We discuss them in the context of their biological underpinnings, introducing ...

In this article, we hypothesize that invariance detection, a general perceptual phenomenon whereby organisms attend to relatively stable patterns or regularities, is an important means by which infants tune in to various aspects of spoken language. In so doing, we synthesize a substantial body of research on detection of regularities across the domains of speech perception, word segmentation, w...

We analyzed the microstructure of child-adult interaction during naturalistic, daylong, automatically labeled audio recordings (13,836 hr total) of children (8- to 48-month-olds) with and without autism. We found that an adult was more likely to respond when the child's vocalization was speech related rather than not speech related. In turn, a child's vocalization was more likely to be speech r...

This paper describes some recent activities on speech technology and corpus development in Thailand. Many speech corpus projects have been launched this year. The National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) recently provides a grant for two cooperative speech corpus projects to interested universities. The first project aims at developing a Thai speech corpus for the research o...