Amodal phonological abstraction in infants at 10 months

Abstract

Infants can abstract amodal information about place of articulation at 4-5 months, before perceptual attunement to native consonants occurs (Altuntas et al., in preparation). We tested infants in the same task at 10 months, after native consonant attunement has commenced, which may affect phonological abstraction relative to 4–5 months. 29 infants acquiring Australian English were trained to associate different cartoon animals with audio-only words from two artificial mini-languages (Language A: Kangaroo; Language B: Kookaburra), which differed in use of only labial or only coronal sets of consonants. They were tested with video-only words (silent talking face) paired with Congruent (matching) or Incongruent (mismatching) animals. We hypothesized that infants would look longer at the Congruent than Incongruent pairings during the test trials, indicating generalization from the auditory (training) to the visual modality (test), i.e., amodal abstraction. Surprisingly, looking times did not differ between Congruent and Incongruent trials. Attunement to native consonants at 10 months may interfere with phonological abstraction of the place of articulation feature across different consonants that share the same place. Examining other phonological abstractions or comparing infants acquiring languages with different consonant inventories could shed light on how perceptual attunement affects amodal phonological abstraction.