In particular, it is unknown whether infants’ prosodic discrimination abilities solely stem from sensitivity to the acoustic distance between prominent and non-prominent vowels, or whether they result from the establishment of prosodic categories, which could be revealed by categorical perception. While prosody is acquired early in development, starting in the womb, and it plays an important role in the initial stages of language development, little is known about how infants mentally represent prosodic regularities. In the present study, we test the unexplored issue of whether infants learning a language with a lexical stress contrast perceive such a contrast categorically, and investigate whether categorical perception (or: categorization, McMurray, 2022) is modulated by infants’ prior experience with music and infant-directed language registers at home. Moreover, infants start relying on language-specific prosodic cues for segmenting words from speech by about 4–6 months of age (e.g., Jusczyk et al., 1999 Nishibayashi et al., 2015). During the first year of life, infants rapidly acquire important prosodic features of their target language, as attested by studies showing cross-linguistic differences in infants’ sensitivity to lexical stress (Höhle et al., 2009 Skoruppa et al., 2009) and major prosodic boundaries (Johnson & Seidl, 2008 van Ommen et al., 2020). Because prosody is aligned with words and syntactic units, it may help infants learn the structural properties of their languages (Morgan & Demuth, 1996 Prieto & Esteve Gibert, 2018). At birth, human infants are sensitive to prosodic information that allows them to discriminate rhythmically different languages (Gasparini et al., 2021 Mehler et al., 1988) or syllable pairs differing in their stress patterns (Sansavini et al., 1997), pitch contours, or duration/pitch properties (Abboub et al., 2016).
Pupil measurement portable#
Sophisticated algorithms developed by RSIP Vision for pupil distance measurement are well-suited for integration into machinery used in eye clinics and can also be embedded as an application in portable devices, such as phones.Language acquisition research suggests that prosody, that is, the suprasegmental aspects of language that include speech rhythm and prominence, is highly relevant for language acquisition. Micro-optics embedded within phones keep improving, and algorithms for pupil distance measurement can be embedded as applications in them. However, these expensive technologies are not yet accessible equally, while vision impairment is frequent throughout the world.While the portability of heavy equipment is limited, and sophisticated technologies are still in the reach of few, a remedy might be the use of portable devices, such as cellphones and tablets. Within these systems, patient motion compensation is already embedded, and errors of less than 0.25 millimeters have been achieved. As algorithms have advanced some manufacturers have employed expensive 3D technologies for precise pupil distance measurement. However, these systems have several disadvantages, primarily caused by their high cost and lack of portability, due to their large size.
These measurements are performed on images of the patient’s face, taken while they stand still. To fit modern precision requirements, lens manufactures have developed systems to measure pupil distance with an error tolerance in the range of one millimeter or less. Such requirements are especially strict in modern glasses, which can accommodate several types of vision corrections: far, intermediate, and near on the same pair. However, these methods were highly error prone and did not fit modern requirements for precision. Classical pupil distance measurement methods included the use of a ruler and a pupilmeter.
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