Development of categorical speech perception in Mandarin‐speaking children and adolescents

Abstract

Although children develop categorical speech perception at a very young age, the maturation process remains unclear. A cross‐sectional study in Mandarin‐speaking 4‐, 6‐, and 10‐year‐old children, 14‐year‐old adolescents, and adults (n = 104, 56 males, all Asians from mainland China) was conducted to investigate the development of categorical perception of four Mandarin phonemic contrasts: lexical tone contrast Tone 1‐2, vowel contrast /u/−/i/, consonant aspiration contrast /p/−/ph/, and consonant formant transition contrast /p/−/t/. The results indicated that different types of phonemic contrasts, and even the identification and discrimination of the same phonemic contrast, matured asynchronously. The observation that tone and vowel perception are achieved earlier than consonant perception supports the phonological saliency hypothesis.

Auditory Discrimination—A Missing Piece of Speech and Language Development: A Study on 6–9-Year-Old Children with Auditory Processing Disorder

“…Our results are consistent with the observations of other researchers conducting studies on different populations, various age groups and other languages [ 7 , 30 , 32 ]. The age at which the ability of phoneme discrimination fully matures, allowing the correct discrimination of phonological oppositions in the native language, has not yet been clearly determined.…”

“…This is the first study that simultaneously investigates the ability to discriminate differences between frequencies and speech sounds (phonemes) in young children. This study used as many as 18 phonological oppositions in terms of differences as to the place and manner of articulation, voicing and nasalization, while other studies limited the analysis of differences to 3–4 contrasts [ 32 ]. The use of abstract linguistic material in this study—nonsense words devoid of lexical and semantic load—makes the obtained results universal in relation to other language systems, especially since categorical perception is an auditory function that develops in children of the same age, regardless of language systems in which they grow up.…”

Sustainable Benefits of High Variability Phonetic Training in Mandarin-speaking Kindergarteners with Cochlear Implants: Evidence from Categorical Perception of Lexical Tones

“…1-3, 3-1, 2-4, 4-2, 3-5, 5-3, 4-6, 6-4, 5-7, and 7-5) were constructed with an interstimulus interval of 500 ms for each contrast. In previous studies using the CP paradigm for lexical tones, the "different" contrasts were typically constructed with two stimuli separated by two steps along the tonal continuum (c.f., Peng et al 2010;Chen & Peng 2021;Ma et al 2021;Feng & Peng 2022). Given the ability of CI participants as reported in the literature and tested in our lab, they could barely hear the distinctions between two stimuli of the "different" contrasts if the separation was only one step apart (i.e., acoustic difference of 15 Hz).…”

“…This criterion was selected because our pilot study showed that the child participants could achieve a ceiling level in recognizing stimuli with T1 (with an accuracy of over 96%). In addition, several prior studies also adopted the criterion of 90% accuracy in practice to ensure that child participants could understand the tasks and follow instruction consistently (e.g., Ma et al 2021;Feng & Peng 2022). The identification test used all seven stimuli of the tonal continuum, and there were two presentation blocks of 70 trials (10 trials for each sound).…”

“…analysis(Finney 1971), including boundary position and boundary width, which are widely used to evaluate the identification performance in the CP paradigm (e.g.,Peng et al 2010;Shen & Froud 2016;Zhang et al 2017;Yu et al 2019;Zhang et al 2020c;Chen & Peng 2021;Ma et al 2021;Feng & Peng 2022). The boundary position refers to the 50% crossover point of the identification curves, and the boundary width refers to the linear distance in terms of the stimulus step between 25% and 75% of the identification responses(Peng et al 2010).…”