Data From: Developmental Change in English-Learning Children’s Interpretations of Salient Pitch Contours in Word Learning

Document Type

Dataset

Publication Date

2024

Subjects

Word learning, Phonology, Prosody, Tone, Language development

Abstract

To efficiently recognize words, children learning an intonational language like English should avoid interpreting pitch-contour variation as signaling lexical contrast, despite the relevance of pitch at other levels of structure. Thus far, the developmental time-course with which English-learning children rule out pitch as a contrastive feature has been incompletely characterized. Prior studies have tested diverse lexical contrasts and have not tested beyond 30 months. To specify the developmental trajectory over a broader age range, we extended a prior study (Quam & Swingley, 2010), in which 30-month-olds and adults disregarded pitch changes, but attended to vowel changes, in newly learned words. Using the same phonological contrasts, we tested 3- to 5-year-olds, 24-month-olds, and 18-month-olds. The older two groups were tested using the language-guided-looking method. The oldest group attended to vowels but not pitch. Surprisingly, 24-month-olds ignored not just pitch but sometimes vowels as well—conflicting with prior findings of phonological constraint at 24 months. The youngest group was tested using the Switch habituation method, half with additional phonetic variability in training. Eighteen-month-olds learned both pitch-contrasted and vowel-contrasted words, whether or not additional variability was present. Thus, native-language phonological constraint was not evidenced prior to 30 months (Quam & Swingley, 2010). Given the surprising insensitivity to mispronunciations at 24 months, we tested 24-month-olds in two additional experiments, which are reported in Supplemental Materials. Experiment S1 tested 24-month-olds in the low-variability condition of the Switch procedure used at 18 months, finding that—in contrast to 18-month-olds—24-month-olds did not detect switches to the trained word-object pairings when the switches involved either a pitch change or a vowel change. Experiment S2 again used Switch habituation training, but tested children in a language-guided looking test instead of a Switch test (Yoshida, Fennell, Swingley, & Werker, 2009). Again, 24-month-olds showed no evidence of detecting subtle differences in word pronunciations. The data from all five experiments (1, 2, 3, S1, S2) are included in the data files in the interests of transparency.

Description

The data supports a manuscript: Quam, C., & Swingley, D. (in press). Change across development in English-learning children’s interpretations of salient pitch contours in word learning. Infancy.

The author's manuscript version of the article is available in PDXScholar: https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/41060

Data Description: The data file is in CSV format and can be opened in Microsoft Excel or (for example) read into the statistical program R via the command read.csv

Participants are English-speaking and participated in language-guided looking and/or Switch habituation. Three age groups were recruited: 18 months, 24 months, and 3-5 years. Participants were recruited in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Language-guided looking experiments (Experiments 1 and 2) involved an eye-tracked laboratory study comprising a single session. All participants were taught a novel word, deebo, and then tested on correct pronunciations, vowel mispronunciations, and/or pitch mispronunciations. Each row contains one participant’s data. Columns are as follows:

columns in Infancy_QuamSwingley_2024_lglStudies_td5_expt1_trialData.csv (3- to 5-year-olds; Experiment 1)

  1. subj participant ID
  2. ageDays participant age in days
  3. t.image target image
  4. order experimental order {1-8}
  5. trial trial number
  6. L.image left image
  7. L.label left image is target (t) or distracter (d)
  8. R.image right image
  9. trainPitch which pitch pattern was taught (A= rise fall; B = low fall)
  10. trial_type {filler,original=correct pronunciation;pitch=pitch mispronunciation;vowel=vowel mispronunciation}
  11. onsIsT is the child looking at the target already at time=0
  12. pct36to2 proportion target looking 367-2000ms
  13. preAll prop.target looking before target onset for that trial
  14. onTask_to2 number of frames fixating either t or d before 2000ms
  15. salience.mean mean pretarget looking for this child in all trials for this stimulus pair

columns in Infancy_QuamSwingley_2024_lglStudies_td24_expt2_trialData.csv (24 month olds; Experiment 2)

  1. subj participant ID
  2. ageDays participant age in days
  3. MP_type {pitch,vowel} - is the child hearing pitch or vowel mispronunciations
  4. t.image target image
  5. order experimental order {1-6}
  6. trial trial number
  7. L.image left image
  8. L.label left image is target (t) or distracter (d)
  9. R.image right image
  10. trainPitch which pitch pattern was taught (A= rise fall; B = low fall)
  11. trial_type {cp= correct pronunciation,mp=mispronunciation}
  12. onsIsT is the child looking at the target already at time=0
  13. pct36to2 proportion target looking 367-2000ms
  14. preAll prop.target looking before target onset for that trial
  15. onTask_to2 number of frames fixating either t or d before 2000ms
  16. salience.mean mean pretarget looking for this child in all trials for this stimulus pair

Switch habituation experiments (Experiments 3, S1, and S2) involved a habituation laboratory study comprising a single session. All participants were presented with two word-object pairings differing in vowel (veedo and vahdo) or pitch contour (e.g., veedo with rise-fall and veedo with low fall). In Experiment 3, half of 18-month-olds heard the word pronounced with additional phonetic variability in training. Experiments 3 and S1 used a Switch habituation test phase in which children were presented with the same word-object pairings from habituation (“Same” trials) or reversed word-object pairings (“Switch” trials). Experiment S2 was a hybrid experiment with a habituation training identical to Experiments 3 and S1, but followed by a language-guided looking test phase. In the test phase, children were presented with familiar-word filler trials and experimental trials. In experimental trials, children saw the two objects from habituation side-by-side on the screen and heard a word token that had been associated with one of the objects during habituation. Each row contains one participant’s data. Columns are as follows:

columns in Infancy_QuamSwingley_2024_habitStudies_switch_expt3_S1_S2.csv (Experiments 3, S1, S2):

  1. “experiment” (e.g., S2)
  2. “variabilityCondition” (lowVar = low variability; highVar = high variability)
  3. Participant/subject ID numbers (“subj”)
  4. Productive vocabulary scores (“vocab”)
  5. Age group (“ageCat”)
  6. Training method (“training”; e.g., “habit”—habituation)
  7. Testing method (“test”; e.g., “LGL”—language-guided looking)
  8. Age in days (“ageDays”)
  9. Biological sex (“Sex”)
  10. Dimension of contrast or mispronunciation (“MP_or_Contrast”; pitch or vowel)
  11. Number of trials to habituation (“numHabitTrials”)
  12. Whether or not the child habituated (1= habituated, 0 = did not habituate)
  13. Time to habituation in seconds (“totalHabitTime”)

For experiments 3 and S1, with Switch test phase:

  1. Average looking time in seconds in two “Same” trials (“sameTrialAve”)
  2. Average looking time in seconds in two “Switch” trials (“switchTrialAve”)
  3. Looking time in post-test trial (“posttest”)

For experiment S2, with language-guided looking test:

  1. target-fixation proportions averaged over 367-2000 ms. after noun onset. Target-fixation proportions are averaged over trials of the following types: “familiarWords” trials;
  2. pitch-mispronunciation (“MP_pitch”) trials;
  3. vowel-mispronunciation (“MP_vowel”) trials


Rights

CC0 1.0 Universal

  • The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.
  • You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

DOI

10.15760/sphr-data.02

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/41059

Access Data Sets

Share

COinS