The perception of the sound of silence in early infancy

When brief periods of silence are inserted between the /s/ and /lit/ portions of the English word "slit" (/slit/), adult listeners typically hear the word as "split" (/split/). 2 experiments were conducted to investigate the ability of 6-8-month-old infants to discriminate brief periods of interconsonantal silence in "slit" versus "split" contrasts. Infants were tested in multiple sessions, using a conditioned head-turning paradigm. 3 sets of stimuli were employed: /slIt/, /slIt/ +Silence, and /splIt/, containing 0, 173, and 90 msec, respectively, of silence duration following the /s/ portion of the stimulus. In both experiments, infants reliably discriminated /slIt/ +Silence from the /slIt/ stimuli but not from the /splIt/ stimuli. Therefore, it appears that infants, like adults, do not treat stimuli containing 90 or 173 msec of silence in this interconsonantal context as different.