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Updated: Apr 17, 2026

Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
Published on: July 1, 2015
Infants Discriminate Voicing and Place of Articulation With Reduced Spectral and Temporal Modulation Cues
Purpose:
This study assessed the role of spectro-temporal modulation cues in the discrimination of 2 phonetic contrasts (voicing and place) for young infants.
Method:
A visual-habituation procedure was used to assess the ability of French-learning 6-month-old infants with normal hearing to discriminate voiced versus unvoiced (/aba/-/apa/) and labial versus dental (/aba/-/ada/) stop consonants. The stimuli were processed by tone-excited vocoders to degrade frequency-modulation cues while preserving: (a) amplitude-modulation (AM) cues within 32 analysis frequency bands, (b) slow AM cues only (<16 Hz) within 32 bands, and (c) AM cues within 8 bands.
Results:
Infants exhibited discrimination responses for both phonetic contrasts in each processing condition. However, when fast AM cues were degraded, infants required a longer exposure to vocoded stimuli to reach the habituation criterion.
Conclusions:
Altogether, these results indicate that the processing of modulation cues conveying phonetic information on voicing and place is "functional" at 6 months. The data also suggest that the perceptual weight of fast AM speech cues may change during development.
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