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Learning to perceive speech: how fricative perception changes, and how it stays the same.
1Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, Nebraska 68131, USA.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|August 21, 2002
Summary
Children learn to focus on specific speech sounds as they acquire their native language. This study shows how their attention to different sound properties, like fricative noises and formant transitions, develops with age.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Linguistics
- Developmental Science
Background:
- Perceptual development involves learning to identify relevant environmental information.
- Speech perception development shows age-related shifts in attention to signal properties.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how children learn to attend to relevant phonetic information in speech.
- To examine age-related differences in speech perception using novel stimuli.
Main Methods:
- Two perception experiments were conducted with adults and children (4, 6, and 8 years old).
- Stimuli included natural fricative noises and synthetic vocalic portions with varying formant transitions.
- Listeners labeled stimuli designed to elicit different weighting of acoustic cues.
Main Results:
- Experiment 1 showed similar labeling patterns across age groups when stimuli were varied.
- Experiment 2 revealed age-related differences, with children weighting formant transitions more than adults.
- Results support the hypothesis that children learn to prioritize specific acoustic cues for phonetic perception.
Conclusions:
- Children's speech perception refines with language experience, leading to selective attention to acoustic properties.
- This study provides further evidence for the role of experience in developing language-specific phonetic perception.