Infants' use of isolated and combined temporal cues in speech sound segregation

This paper investigates infants' and adults' use of envelope cues and combined onset asynchrony and envelope cues in the segregation of concurrent vowels. Listeners heard superimposed vowel pairs consisting of two different vowels spoken by a male and a female talker and were trained to respond to one specific target vowel, either the male /u:/ or male /i:/. Vowel detection was measured in three conditions. In the baseline condition the two superimposed vowels had similar amplitude envelopes and synchronous onset. In the envelope cue condition, the amplitude envelopes of the two vowels differed. In the combined cue condition, both the onset time and amplitude envelopes of the two vowels differed. Seven-month-old infants' concurrent vowel segregation improved both with envelope and with combined onset asynchrony and envelope cues to the same extent as adults'. A preliminary investigation with 3-month-old infants suggested that neither envelope cues nor combined asynchrony and envelope cues improved their ability to detect the target vowel. Taken together, these results suggest that envelope and combined onset-asynchrony cues are available to infants as they attempt to process competing speech sounds, at least after 7 months of age.