Journal
COGNITION
Volume 82, Issue 3, Pages B101-B111Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/S0010-0277(01)00157-3
Keywords
infant sensitivity; distributional information; phonetic discrimination
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For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phonetic variation in the speech signal influences whether 6- and 8-month-old infants discriminate a pair of speech sounds. We familiarized infants with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting either a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. During the test phase, only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum, These results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the input language, and that this sensitivity influences speech perception. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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