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Speech perception in infants.

P D Eimas, E R Siqueland, P Jusczyk

    Science (New York, N.Y.)
    |January 22, 1971
    PubMed
    Summary
    This summary is machine-generated.

    Infants show categorical perception of speech sounds. Even young infants discriminate sounds differently based on adult phonemic categories, demonstrating early language processing abilities.

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    Area of Science:

    • Developmental Psychology
    • Linguistics
    • Auditory Perception

    Background:

    • Human infants possess remarkable abilities to perceive speech sounds from birth.
    • The perception of speech sounds in adults is often categorical, meaning acoustic variations within a category are perceived as the same, while variations across categories are perceived as different.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • To investigate whether infants as young as 1 and 4 months old exhibit categorical perception of synthetic speech sounds.
    • To determine if infants' discrimination of speech sounds is influenced by adult phonemic boundaries.

    Main Methods:

    • Habituation procedure: Infants were habituated to one synthetic speech sound until their attention waned.
    • Discriminability testing: A second speech sound was presented, and recovery of attention (measured by conditioned response rate) indicated discrimination.

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  • Stimuli varied along an acoustic continuum known to cue phonemic distinctions in adults.

    • Main Results:

    • Infants showed greater recovery from habituation when the two speech sounds belonged to different adult phonemic categories compared to when they belonged to the same category.
    • A discontinuity in discrimination was observed around the adult phonemic boundary, suggesting infants perceive the boundary categorically.

    Conclusions:

    • One- and 4-month-old infants demonstrate categorical perception of speech sounds.
    • This suggests that the human auditory system may be pre-tuned to perceive speech in a categorical manner, reflecting early language acquisition mechanisms.