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Updated: Dec 14, 2025
05:35
Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
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Infant Discrimination of a Morphologically Relevant Word-Final Contrast
Laurel Fais1, Sachiyo Kajikawa2, Shigeaki Amano2
1University of British Columbia, Canada.
Summary
Infants can distinguish speech sounds that signal grammatical information like plurals. This ability develops early, aiding language acquisition in English-hearing babies.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Speech Perception
Background:
- Infants' ability to perceive speech sounds is crucial for language acquisition.
- Phonetic cues, such as final consonant clusters, carry important grammatical information in English.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether infants can discriminate between nonwords ending in /k/ or /t/ and those ending in /ks/ or /ts/.
- To determine the developmental timeline of this discrimination ability in infants aged 6, 12, and 18 months.
Main Methods:
- A habituation-dishabituation looking time paradigm was employed.
- Infants were presented with auditory stimuli differing in final consonant clusters.
- Looking time was measured to assess auditory discrimination.
Main Results:
- Infants at all tested ages (6, 12, and 18 months) successfully discriminated the nonword forms.
- The ability to distinguish between final stop consonants and final clusters was evident across these age groups.
Conclusions:
- English-hearing infants possess the ability to discriminate phonetic contrasts in final consonant clusters early in development.
- This discrimination ability likely supports the acquisition of English morphological concepts (plural, possession, person).
- The findings highlight the robustness of speech sound discrimination in infants during critical language development periods.
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