Developmental Aspects of Cross-Language Speech Perception

Abstract

Previous research has suggested that infants discriminate many speech sounds according to phonemic category regardless of language exposure, while adults of one language group may have difficulty discriminating nonnative linguistic contrasts. Our study attempted to address directly questions about infant perceptual ability and the possibility of its decline as a function of development in the absence of specific experience by comparing English-speaking adults, Hindi-speaking adults, and 7-month-old infants on their ability to discriminate 2 pairs of natural Hindi (non-English) speech contrasts. To do this, infants were tested in a "visually reinforced infant speech discrimination" paradigm, while a variant of this paradigm was used to test adults. Support was obtained for the above hypotheses. Infants were shown to be able to discriminate both Hindi sound pairs, and support for the idea of a decrease in speech perceptual abilities wih age and experience was clearly evident with the rarer of the 2 non-English contrasts. The results were then discussed with respect to the possible nature and purpose of these abilities.

Age at implantation and development of vocal and auditory preverbal skills in implanted deaf children

“…Developmental studies in animals and humans indicate that there are critical/sensitive periods during which the developing central nervous system can most readily use sensory information in order to form linguistic structure [15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Insufficient auditory stimulation during these critical periods of a child's development will most likely lead to linguistic and communicative deficits [22].…”

Discrimination in Autism Within Different Sensory Modalities

“…For example, it is possible to speculate how enhanced auditory discrimination might contribute to the language delay observed in autism. Typically developing neonates can discriminate between speech sounds of many different languages, including ones they have never been exposed to (Werker, Gilbert, Humphrey, & Tees, 1981) but exposure to a specific language results in a reduction in the ability to perceive differences between speech sounds that do not differentiate between words in that language (Werker et al, 1981). It is argued that through exposure to language, neonates group together variants of phonemes into categories of sounds that distinguish between words, such that all the variants in the category come to be perceived as that one phoneme and subsequently discrimination between exemplars of that phoneme becomes difficult (Iverson & Kuhl, 1995;Kuhl, 1991).…”

Speech errors reflect newly learned phonotactic constraints.

“…For infants, this is their only experience of these constraints. Infants begin discriminating between syllables of their native language and a nonnative language at 6 months (Werker & Lalonde, 1988) and do not begin producing speechlike syllables until about 12 months old (Werker, 1995). If recent experience is an impetus to learning phonotactic constraints in speech production, we should also be able to absorb these constraints through listening and comprehension.…”