Infant Discrimination of a Morphologically Relevant Word-Final Contrast

Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies
Laurel FaisJanet F Werker

Abstract

Six-, 12-, and 18-month-old English-hearing infants were tested on their ability to discriminate nonword forms ending in the final stop consonants /k/ and /t/ from their counterparts with final /s/ added, resulting in final clusters /ks/ and /ts/, in a habituation-dishabituation, looking time paradigm. Infants at all 3 ages demonstrated an ability to discriminate this type of contrast, a contrast that constitutes one phonetic cue for the English morphological concepts of plural, possession, and person. These results suggest that across a significant portion of the development of infants' speech perception, this type of final contrast is discriminable.

References

Dec 1, 1977·Journal of Speech and Hearing Research·R E EilersJ M Moore
May 1, 1977·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·R E Eilers
Sep 1, 1993·Perception & Psychophysics·A D Friederici, J M Wessels
Jul 29, 2005·Developmental Science·Daniel Swingley
Jul 1, 2006·Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies·Tania S Zamuner

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