Cross-language study of speech pattern learning

Abstract

In order to investigate the nature of some processes in speech acquisition, synthetic speechlike stimuli were played to groups of English and French children between 2 and 14 years of age. The variable acoustic parameters were voice-onset time and first-formant transition. Three stages were observed in the development of children's labelling behavior. These were called scattered labeling, progressive labeling, and categorical labeling, repectively. Individual response patterns were examined. The first stage (scattered labeling) includes mostly children up to 2 or 3 years of age for the English, and up to about 4–5 for the French. Progressive labelling behavior is found mostly amongst children aged 3 and 4 (for the English), up to about 7–8 for the French. Categorical labeling only becomes the dominant pattern at the age of 5–6 for the English, several years later for the French. Not all follow this process with identical chronological stages. For instance, some 3-year-olds give categorical labeling and about one third of 11- to 13-year-olds do not respond in a sharply categorical fashion. However, the overall development was found to be highly significant (p smaller than 0.002, one tail test, for both English and French, using Kendall's Tau measure of correlation). These findings indicate that categorical labeling for speech sounds is not innate but learned through a relatively slow process which is to a certain extent language specific. The interpretation of previous experimental work in the field may have to be re-examined—as well as their theoretical implications—in the light of the present results.