The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1979 · 320 citations · 0 references
Language StudiesLinguisticsPsychologyChild DevelopmentDevelopmental PsychologyPhoneticsAuditory DiscriminationInfant DevelopmentSpeech PerceptionSpeech Sound DiscriminationVowel ClassificationVowel PhoneticsInfant PerceptionLanguage-specific Vowel CategoriesPerceptionPerceptual Vowel CategorizationSpeech Perception DevelopmentVowel AcquisitionVowel ContrastVowel Perception
Infant studies show that while babies can discriminate individual speech sounds, few demonstrate that they recognize phonetic similarities across different contexts, positions, and talkers. In two experiments, six‑month‑old infants were first trained to discriminate /a/ versus /i/ produced by a computer‑simulated male voice, then exposed to progressively new tokens or immediately tested with all male, female, and child talker tokens. Both experiments showed rapid transfer of learning from male‑voice tokens to female and child tokens, providing strong evidence that six‑month‑old infants recognize vowel categories as adult English speakers do.
While numerous studies on infant perception demonstrate the infant’s ability to discriminate individual speech-sound pairs, very few demonstrate the infant’s ability to recognize the similarity among phonetic units when they occur in different phonetic contexts, in different positions in a syllable, or when they are spoken by different talkers. In two studies, six-month-old infants demonstrated the ability to distinguish two spectrally dissimilar vowel categories (/a/ and /i/) in which the vowel tokens were generated to simulate tokens produced by a male, a female, and a child talker. In experiment I, the infants were initially trained to discriminate the /a/ and /i/ tokens produced by the computer-simulated male voice. They were then gradually exposed to a number of novel tokens in a progressive transfer-of-learning task. In experiment II, the infants were initially trained to discriminate the same vowel contrast, but were then immediately tested with all of the tokens in both vowel categories. In both experiments the infants demonstrated rapid transfer of learning from the traning tokens produced by the male talker to the tokens produced by female and child talkers. Both experiments provide strong evidence that the six-month-old infant recognizes acoustic categories that conform to the vowel categories perceived by adult speakers of English.