TY - JOUR
T1 - Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination
AU - Maye, Jessica
AU - Werker, Janet F.
AU - Gerken, Lou Ann
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a University of Arizona SBSRI graduate student research grant to J. Maye, a Canada Research Chair and Canadian NSERC research grant (RGP 1103) to J. Werker, and an NSF grant (#SBR9696072) to L. Gerken. The research was conducted in part while the first author was a participant in the Junior Scholars in Residence program sponsored by the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of British Colombia. We are grateful to Karla Kaun, Fiona Scott, and Elizabeth Job for their assistance in recruiting and testing participants, and to Richard Aslin, Elissa Newport, Athena Vouloumanos, Daniel Weiss, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
PY - 2002
Y1 - 2002
N2 - For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phonetic variation in the speech signal influences whether 6- and 8-month-old infants discriminate a pair of speech sounds. We familiarized infants with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting either a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. During the test phase, only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. These results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the input language, and that this sensitivity influences speech perception.
AB - For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phonetic variation in the speech signal influences whether 6- and 8-month-old infants discriminate a pair of speech sounds. We familiarized infants with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting either a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. During the test phase, only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. These results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the input language, and that this sensitivity influences speech perception.
KW - Distributional information
KW - Infant sensitivity
KW - Phonetic discrimination
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U2 - 10.1016/S0010-0277(01)00157-3
DO - 10.1016/S0010-0277(01)00157-3
M3 - Article
C2 - 11747867
AN - SCOPUS:0036135352
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 82
SP - B101-B111
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 3
ER -