Consonant Cue Perception by Twenty- To Twenty-Four-Week-Old Infants

Moffitt, Alan

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1971.tb03694.x

Cited by 49 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…During the first half-year, NH infants are able to detect and discriminate fine-grained differences in speech sounds that differentiate words in any of the world's languages. Numerous investigations have shown that young infants are able to discriminate vowels [10][11][12] and consonants that differ with respect to voicing [13], place [14][15][16], and manner [17,18] of articulation. Moreover, up to about 8 months of age, infants are able to detect and discriminate many phonetic contrasts that are not phonologically relevant in the ambient language but are relevant in other languages [11,[19][20][21][22] (see [8] for a review).…”

Section: Speech Discriminationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech perception skills of deaf infants following cochlear implantation: a first report

Houston

Pisoni

Kirk

et al. 2003

International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

104

116

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SummaryObjective-We adapted a behavioral procedure that has been used extensively with normalhearing (NH) infants, the visual habituation (VH) procedure, to assess deaf infants' discrimination and attention to speech.Methods-Twenty-four NH 6-month-olds, 24 NH 9-month-olds, and 16 deaf infants at various ages before and following cochlear implantation (CI) were tested in a sound booth on their caregiver's lap in front of a TV monitor. During the habituation phase, each infant was presented with a repeating speech sound (e.g. 'hop hop hop') paired with a visual display of a checkerboard pattern on half of the trials ('sound trials') and only the visual display on the other half ('silent trials'). When the infant's looking time decreased and reached a habituation criterion, a test phase began. This consisted of two trials: an 'old trial' that was identical to the 'sound trials' and a 'novel trial' that consisted of a different repeating speech sound (e.g. 'ahhh') paired with the same checkerboard pattern.Results-During the habituation phase, NH infants looked significantly longer during the sound trials than during the silent trials. However, deaf infants who had received cochlear implants (CIs) displayed a much weaker preference for the sound trials. On the other hand, both NH infants and deaf infants with CIs attended significantly longer to the visual display during the novel trial than during the old trial, suggesting that they were able to discriminate the speech patterns. Before receiving CIs, deaf infants did not show any preferences.Conclusions-Taken together, the findings suggest that deaf infants who receive CIs are able to detect and discriminate some speech patterns. However, their overall attention to speech sounds may be less than NH infants'. Attention to speech may impact other aspects of speech perception and spoken language development, such as segmenting words from fluent speech and learning novel words. Implications of the effects of early auditory deprivation and age at CI on speech perception and language development are discussed.

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Section: Speech Discriminationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech perception skills of deaf infants following cochlear implantation: a first report

Houston

Pisoni

Kirk

et al. 2003

International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

104

116

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Initially, many studies explored infants' abilities to discriminate different types of phonetic contrasts. In addition to discriminating voicing contrasts between consonants, infants were also found to perceive consonant differences involving place of articulation (Eimas, 1974;Levitt, Jusczyk, Murray, & Carden, 1988;Moffitt, 1971;Morse, 1972) and manner of articulation (Eimas, 1975;Eimas & Miller, 1980b;Hillenbrand, Minifie, & Edwards, 1979). Although such studies typically contrasted phones in the initial portions of the syllables, infants were also shown to detect some contrasts at the ends of syllables (Jusczyk, 1977) and in the middle of multisyllabic utterances (Jusczyk, Copan, & Thompson, 1978;Karzon, 1985;Williams, Reference Note 24).…”

Section: The Development Of Speech Perception Capacities: Early Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech Perception and Spoken Word Recognition: Past and Present

Jusezyk

Luce

2002

Ear and Hearing

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Objective: The scientific study of the perception of spoken language has been an exciting, prolific, and productive area of research for more than 50 yr. We have learned much about infants' and adults' remarkable capacities for perceiving and understanding the sounds of their language, as evidenced by our increasingly sophisticated theories of acquisition, process, and representation. We present a selective, but we hope, representative review of the past half century of research on speech perception, paying particular attention to the historical and theoretical contexts within which this research was conducted. Our foci in this review fall on three principle topics: early work on the discrimination and categorization of speech sounds, more recent efforts to understand the processes and representations that subserve spoken word recognition, and research on how infants acquire the capacity to perceive their native language. Our intent is to provide the reader a sense of the progress our field has experienced over the last half century in understanding the human's extraordinary capacity for the perception of spoken language. The Beginnings of Speech Perception Research: Some Core IssuesResearch on the perception of speech began in earnest during the 1950s. Not surprisingly, the agenda for the field was set by the kinds of issues that preoccupied language researchers of that era. In the field of linguistics, a major goal was to devise rigorous scientific procedures that would yield a correct structural description of a particular language when provided with a detailed corpus of utterances (Bloomfield, 1933;Harris, 1955). This approach, known as taxonomic linguistics, made certain assumptions about how such a description should proceed. The general view was that a language is hierarchically organized at a number of distinctive levels, so that an accurate description of language structure required descriptions of the organization at each level of the hierarchy. Moreover, because the aim was to achieve a scientific description, the structural analysis of a particular language began with what could be directly observed, namely, the acoustic waveforms of utterances. Because of this emphasis on what could be objectively observed, the description provided for a given level was not supposed to depend on the description of any of the higher levels. In principle, then, a description of a language would begin with an account of how acoustic properties map onto phonetic segments (the phonetic level), how the phonetic segments mapped to particular phonemes (the phonemic level), how the phonemes are combined to form morphemes in the language (morphemic level), and eventually to how the morphemes are combined to form sentences (the syntactic level). Thus, although speech perception research is very much an interdisciplinary field, drawing on concepts and methods from physics, engineering, linguistics, and psychology, many of the core problems that drove the early research efforts reflected the view that languages are hierarchical...

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“…The assumption that human listeners are innately sensitive to properties of the onset spectra for different places of stop consonant articulation could, as Stevens and Blumstein (e.g., 1978;Blumstein and Stevens, 1979) suggest, account for the ability of prelinguistic infants to discriminate place of articulation differences in synthetic three-formant and three-formant + burst stimuli (Eimas, 1974;Leavitt et al, 1976;Miller and Morse, 1976;Moffitt, 1971;Morse, 1972;Till, 1976;Williams and Bush, 1978). Although previous demonstrations of the infant's ability to discriminate place of articulation differences in stop consonants lend support to Stevens and Blumstein's argument, it is not known whether the onset spectra of the stimuli employed in these studies possessed the critical properties described by Stevens and Blumstein.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infant discrimination of two- and five-formant voiced stop consonants differing in place of articulation

Walley

Pisoni

Aslin

1984

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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According to recent theoretical accounts of place of articulation perception, global, invariant properties of the stop CV syllable onset spectrum serve as primary, innate cues to place of articulation, whereas contextually variable formant transitions constitute secondary, learned cues. By this view, one might expect that young infants would find the discrimination of place of articulation contrasts signaled by formant transition differences more difficult than those cued by gross spectral differences. Using an operant head-turning paradigm, we found that 6-month-old infants were able to discriminate two-formant stimuli contrasting in place of articulation as well as they did five-formant + burst stimuli. Apparently, neither the global properties of the onset spectrum nor simply the additional acoustic information contained in the five-formant + burst stimuli afford the infant any advantage in the discrimination task. Rather, formant transition information provides a sufficient basis for discriminating place of articulation differences.

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Consonant Cue Perception by Twenty- To Twenty-Four-Week-Old Infants

Cited by 49 publications

References 13 publications

Speech perception skills of deaf infants following cochlear implantation: a first report

Speech perception skills of deaf infants following cochlear implantation: a first report

Speech Perception and Spoken Word Recognition: Past and Present

Infant discrimination of two- and five-formant voiced stop consonants differing in place of articulation

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