Leslie and crew in Developmental Science

Newborns' language discrimination may not reflect sensitivity to speech rhythm.

Now out in Developmental Science, "Newborns' Language Discrimination May Not Reflect Sensitivity to Speech Rhythm: Evidence From Computational Modeling," from the Class of 2025's Leslie Famularo, together with her advisor Naomi Feldman, former postdoc Thomas Schatz, and UMD undergraduate researcher Ali Aboelata. Abstracted below, the paper reports research Leslie did during her time in the NACS program at UMD leading up to her dissertation, "Grounding speech perception modeling in auditory neuroscience through differentiability."

Human newborns are able to discriminate between certain languages but not others. This ability has long been attributed to sensitivity to rhythm—the temporal regularities in speech of different languages. Here, we demonstrate through a series of computational simulations that this discrimination behavior can be achieved using no temporal information at all. Our results raise the possibility that early language discrimination may be independent of speech rhythm, and call for theoretical reconsideration of how infants learn suprasegmental information in the first few months of their lives.