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Two-month-old infants' sensitivity to allophonic differences

E A Hohne1, P W Jusczyk

  • 1Department of Psychology, SUNY at Buffalo 14260-4110.

Perception & Psychophysics
|December 1, 1994
PubMed
Summary
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Two-month-old infants can distinguish subtle sound variations (allophonic differences) crucial for understanding spoken language. This ability helps them identify word boundaries in fluent speech.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Speech Perception

Background:

  • Fluent speech segmentation is essential for language acquisition.
  • Infants' ability to perceive phonetic and allophonic variations is a key area of study.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if 2-month-old infants can discriminate allophonic differences.
  • To determine if these allophonic distinctions aid in identifying word boundaries.

Main Methods:

  • High-amplitude sucking procedure used to test infant discrimination.
  • Stimuli included word pairs like "nitrate" vs. "night rate" and "nikrate" vs. "nike rate" to isolate allophonic cues.
  • Experiment 2 used cross-spliced stimuli to control for prosodic differences.

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Main Results:

  • Infants successfully discriminated between word pairs differing in allophonic variations.
  • Discrimination was maintained even when prosodic cues were minimized.
  • Infants distinguished "nitrate" from a modified "night rate" based solely on allophonic differences.

Conclusions:

  • Two-month-old infants possess the capacity to discriminate relevant allophonic distinctions.
  • This ability is a prerequisite for using allophonic information to segment fluent speech.
  • Findings suggest early-developing mechanisms for processing fine phonetic details in speech.