The Discrimination of Foreign Speech Contrasts by Infants and Adults

Abstract

TREHUB, SANDRA E. The Discrimination of Foreign Speech Contrasts by Infants and Adults. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 466-472. Infants 5-17 weeks of age were presented with foreign speech sounds which were contingent upon their nonutritive sucking. When the infants met a specified criterion of sucking decrement, a contrasting sound was substituted. Significant differences in response recovery for experimental versus control (no sound change) subjects were found for the contrast pairs [pa]-[p-a] and [za]-[ia]. Adults were presented with a comparable discrimination task for the foreign contrasts [za]-[ia] and the English contrasts [li]-[ri]. It was found that adults achieved perfect accuracy with English contrasts but readily confused the foreign contrasts. The implications of these results for theories of perceptual development are discussed.