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Linguistic experience and phonemic perception in infancy: a crosslinguistic study.
Child Development
|March 1, 1979
Summary
Infants learning Spanish can distinguish between English and Spanish speech sounds, but infants learning English only distinguish their native sounds. Linguistic experience shapes early speech perception development.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Auditory Perception
Background:
- Infants' speech perception abilities are shaped by their linguistic environment.
- Early exposure to language influences how infants process auditory stimuli.
- Voice onset time (VOT) is a crucial phonetic feature in speech perception.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how linguistic experience affects infants' perception of speech contrasts.
- To compare the speech discrimination abilities of English-learning and Spanish-learning infants.
- To examine the role of native language exposure in developing auditory perception skills.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the Visually Reinforced Infant Speech Discrimination (VRISD) paradigm with 6-8 month old infants.
- Infants were trained to associate auditory stimulus changes with a visual reward.
- Tested perception of synthetic speech contrasts differing in voice onset time (VOT), native to English and Spanish.
Main Results:
- Spanish-learning infants demonstrated discrimination of both English and Spanish speech contrasts.
- English-learning infants showed discrimination only for the English native contrast.
- Results indicate a differential impact of linguistic experience on infant speech perception.
Conclusions:
- Early linguistic experience plays a critical role in tuning speech perception abilities.
- Infants learning Spanish show broader phonetic discrimination skills compared to English-learning infants.
- The development of speech perception is significantly influenced by the native language environment.