Sponsor
Funding was provided by NIH grant F32HD065382 to CQ and NSF grant 0950601 to LAG.
Document Type
Post-Print
Publication Date
10-2020
Abstract
To learn speech‐sound categories, infants must identify the acoustic dimensions that differentiate categories and selectively attend to them as opposed to irrelevant dimensions. Variability on irrelevant acoustic dimensions can aid formation of robust categories in infants through adults in tasks such as word learning (e.g., Rost and McMurray, 2009) or speech‐sound learning (e.g., Lively et al., 1993). At the same time, variability sometimes overwhelms learners, interfering with learning and processing. Two prior studies (Kuhl & Miller, 1982; Jusczyk, Pisoni, & Mullennix, 1992) found that irrelevant variability sometimes impaired early sound discrimination. We asked whether variability would impair or facilitate discrimination for older infants, comparing 7.5‐month‐old infants' discrimination of an early acquired native contrast, /p/ vs. /b/ (in the word forms /pIm/ vs. /bIm/), in Experiment 1, with an acoustically subtle, non‐native contrast, /n/ vs. /ŋ/ (in /nIm/ vs. /ŋIm/), in Experiment 2. Words were spoken by one or four talkers. Infants discriminated the native but not the non‐native contrast, and there were no significant effects of talker condition. We discuss implications for theories of phonological learning and avenues for future research.
Rights
© 2020 International Congress of Infant Studies
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1111/infa.12371
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/34107
Citation Details
Published as: Quam C, Clough L, Knight S, Gerken L. Infants' discrimination of consonant contrasts in the presence and absence of talker variability. Infancy. 2020;00:1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12371
Description
This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Infancy. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Infancy, 2020;00:1–20.