Young infants' discrimination of subtle phonetic contrasts

Cognition
M SundaraSharon Peperkamp

Abstract

It is generally accepted that infants initially discriminate native and non-native contrasts and that perceptual reorganization within the first year of life results in decreased discrimination of non-native contrasts, and improved discrimination of native contrasts. However, recent findings from Narayan, Werker, and Beddor (2010) surprisingly suggested that some acoustically subtle native-language contrasts might not be discriminated until the end of the first year of life. We first provide countervailing evidence that young English-learning infants can discriminate the Filipino contrast tested by Narayan et al. when tested in a more sensitive paradigm. Next, we show that young infants learning either English or French can also discriminate comparably subtle non-native contrasts from Tamil. These findings show that Narayan et al.'s null findings were due to methodological choices and indicate that young infants are sensitive to even subtle acoustic contrasts that cue phonetic distinctions cross-linguistically. Based on experimental results and acoustic analyses, we argue that instead of specific acoustic metrics, infant discrimination results themselves are the most informative about the salience of phonetic distinctions.

References

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Citations

Aug 5, 2020·Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies·Saioa LarrazaArthur G Samuel
Feb 28, 2021·Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies·Nikola PaillereauKateřina Chládková
Jan 28, 2021·Developmental Science·Yun Jung Kim, Megha Sundara
Mar 5, 2021·Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. Cognitive Science·Carolyn Quam, Sarah C Creel
Oct 17, 2020·Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies·Carolyn QuamLouAnn Gerken

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