SAGE Journal Articles

Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.

SAGE Journal User Guide

Article 1: Best, C. T., & Avery, R. A. (1999). Left-hemisphere advantage for click consonants is determined by linguistic significance and experience. Psychological Science, 10(1), 65-70. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00108

  • An empirical study comparing the contributions of the left hemisphere to acoustic, sound processing and linguistic experience for perceiving click consonants in Zulu. American English and Zulu speakers were compared, showing that

Discussion Questions

  1. What were the three kinds of click syllables compared in the experiment? Mimic where the tongue would be placed to articulate these consonants. 
  2. Describe the dichotic listening task. Why were the click syllables played to different ears?
  3. Did the Zulu or English speakers, or both, show a right-ear advantage for identifying the clicks?
  4. What do these results tell us about how clicks are processed when they are part of a language vs. not?

Article 2: Goldstein, M. H., & Schwade, J. A. (2008). Social feedback to infants’ babbling facilitates rapid phonological learning. Psychological Science, 19, 515-523. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02117.x

  • An empirical study illustrating that a caregiver providing contingent feedback to an infant helps shape the child’s vocalizations into more regular phonological patterns, as speech development moves from babbling to syllables and words.

Discussion Questions

  1. Mothers responded to their infant’s babbling according to one of four conditions. List the conditions, and explain how contingent and noncontingent feedback were established.
  2. Describe what an ABA procedure is, and identify which phase of this experiment was the first A, the B, and the second A. Considering the results in Figures 2-4, which condition(s) showed a change in the B phase? Did that change persist in the second A phase or not?
  3. Overall, are the results more consistent with the idea that infants are closely mimicking the particular sounds their caregiver produces, or with infants learning at a more abstract level of phoneme patterns? Explain.
  4. Why do you think contingent feedback is so important to a child’s speech perception and production? What do you think would happen if a child were blind but could still hear contingent spoken and other auditory feedback?