Earlier Speech Exposure Does Not Accelerate Speech Acquisition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical periods in language acquisition have been discussed primarily with reference to studies of people who are deaf or bilingual. Here, we provide evidence on the opening of sensitivity to the linguistic environment by studying the response to a change of phoneme at a native and nonnative phonetic boundary in full-term and preterm human infants using event-related potentials. Full-term infants show a decline in their discrimination of nonnative phonetic contrasts between 9 and 12 months of age. Because the womb is a high-frequency filter, many phonemes are strongly degraded in utero. Preterm infants thus benefit from earlier and richer exposure to broadcast speech. We find that preterms do not take advantage of this enriched linguistic environment: the decrease in amplitude of the mismatch response to a nonnative change of phoneme at the end of the first year of life was dependent on maturational age and not on the duration of exposure to broadcast speech. The shaping of phonological representations by the environment is thus strongly constrained by brain maturation factors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".