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Related Experiment Videos

Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination.

Jessica Maye1, Janet F Werker, LouAnn Gerken

  • 1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Meliora Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA. jmaye@bcs.rochester.edu

Cognition
|December 19, 2001
PubMed
Summary
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Infants

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Auditory Perception

Background:

  • Infants' speech sound perception is shaped by native language input within the first year of life.
  • The precise mechanism driving these developmental changes in speech perception has been unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To provide the first evidence for a mechanism explaining how infants' native language input affects speech sound perception.
  • To investigate the role of statistical distribution of phonetic variation in infant speech perception.

Main Methods:

  • Familiarizing 6- and 8-month-old infants with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum.
  • Presenting speech sounds with either a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution during familiarization.
  • Testing infants' ability to discriminate speech sounds from the continuum endpoints.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Infants exposed to a bimodal distribution of speech sounds discriminated endpoint tokens.
  • Infants exposed to a unimodal distribution did not discriminate endpoint tokens.
  • Sensitivity to statistical distribution of speech sounds influences speech perception.

Conclusions:

  • Infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of phonetic variation in their linguistic environment.
  • This sensitivity is a key mechanism influencing the developmental changes in infant speech perception.
  • Findings shed light on early language acquisition and the plasticity of auditory processing.