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Updated: Dec 14, 2025

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
Infant Discrimination of a Morphologically Relevant Word-Final Contrast
Laurel Fais1, Sachiyo Kajikawa2, Shigeaki Amano2
1University of British Columbia, Canada.
Abstract:
Six-, 12-, and 18-month-old English-hearing infants were tested on their ability to discriminate nonword forms ending in the final stop consonants /k/ and /t/ from their counterparts with final /s/ added, resulting in final clusters /ks/ and /ts/, in a habituation-dishabituation, looking time paradigm. Infants at all 3 ages demonstrated an ability to discriminate this type of contrast, a contrast that constitutes one phonetic cue for the English morphological concepts of plural, possession, and person. These results suggest that across a significant portion of the development of infants' speech perception, this type of final contrast is discriminable.
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