Abstract
Perceptual stability in adult listeners is supported by the ability to process acoustic-phonetic variation categorically and dynamically adjust category boundaries given systematic contextual influences. The current study examined the developmental trajectory of such flexibility. Adults and school-aged children (5-10 years of age) made voicing identification decisions to voice-onset-time (VOT) continua that differed in speaking rate and place of articulation. The results showed that both populations were sensitive to contextual influences; the voicing boundary was located at a longer VOT for the slow compared to the fast speaking rate continuum and for the velar compared to the labial continuum, and the magnitude of the displacement was slighter greater for the adults compared to the children. Moreover, the two populations differed in terms of the absolute location of the voicing boundaries and the categorization slopes, with slopes becoming more categorical as age increased. These results demonstrate that sensitivity to contextual influences on speech perception emerges early in development, but mature perceptual tuning requires extended experience.
Highlights
A central goal of research within the domain of speech perception is to describe the mechanisms supporting listeners’ ability to reliably perceive speech segments given a lack of invariance between the acoustic signal and any given consonant or vowel
Of relevance to the current work, is the general convergence in past work showing that that VOT variation is processed categorically in both populations, and that multiple studies have found evidence that perception of VOT is less categorical in children compared to adults (e.g., Zlatin and Koenigsknecht, 1975; Burnham et al, 1991; Hoonhorst et al, 2011). These findings suggest that while the broad strokes of perceptual organization for accommodating contextual influences are in place early in development, experience plays a role in fine-tuning the mapping between the acoustic signal and speech segments for many years
A comprehensive theoretical account of speech perception must describe the mechanisms that support reliable mapping from the acoustic signal to speech sounds given a lack of invariance between the two
Summary
A central goal of research within the domain of speech perception is to describe the mechanisms supporting listeners’ ability to reliably perceive speech segments given a lack of invariance between the acoustic signal and any given consonant or vowel. Consider the acoustic information used to specify just one class of sounds, stop consonants. The acoustic information produced for a given stop consonant varies widely due to a host of factors including speaking rate (Miller et al, 1986; Nagao and de Jong, 2007), following phonetic context (Delattre et al, 1955), place of articulation (Volaitis and Miller, 1992), and even who in particular is producing the stop consonant (Theodore et al, 2009). In order to achieve reliable perception of stop consonants (and other speech sounds), perceptual mechanisms must support the successful mapping of many acoustically distinct elements to a single phonetic category. For the literature reviewed below, the language of the stimuli and participants is English unless otherwise specified
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