Abstract
Voice onset time (VOT) refers to the relation between laryngeal pulsing and the onset of consonant release. Variations in VOT appear to be one of the cues utilized by adults to discriminate between various voiced and voiceless stop consonants. Adult listeners can discriminate between variations in VOT only to the extent that they can assign unique labels to the sounds. Adults are unable to discriminate between bilabial stop consonant sounds with VOT values of 0 and + 20 msec. The three methods used to determine whether discrimination of the VOT continuum in infants is learned or innate are: high amplitude sucking (HAS), habituation of heart rate (HR), and auditory evoked responses (AER). HAS requires the active participation of the subjects and hence a high attrition rate with young infants is to be expected due to their highly variable state. The difficulty associated with the HAS procedure concerns its applicability to only a narrow age range of subjects. The HAS procedure has been used with only limited success with newborn infants. HR, like HAS, is a method that depends on the habituation of a response to a stimulus, but unlike HAS, requires little active participation from subjects. The HR method is based on the role of the orienting reflex in the responsiveness of infants to their environment. The AER is an electrocortical response evoked by an external auditory stimulus. AERs have also been used to investigate VOT perception. The AER procedure has proven to be an effective means of assessing responses to VOT stimuli across subject populations of diverse ages.
Published Version
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