Abstract
In this paper, we report data on the development of Korean infants’ perception of a rare fricative phoneme distinction. Korean fricative consonants have received much interest in the linguistic community due to the language’s distinct categorization of sounds. Unlike many fricative contrasts utilized in most of the world’s languages, Korean fricatives (/s*/-/s/) are all voiceless. Moreover, compared with other sound categories, fricatives have received very little attention in the speech perception development field and no studies thus far have examined Korean infants’ development of native phonology in this domain. Using a visual habituation paradigm, we tested 4‒6-month-old and 7‒9-month-old Korean infants on their abilities to discriminate the Korean fricative pair in the [a] vowel context, /s*a/-/sa/, which can be distinguished based on acoustic cues, such as the durations of aspiration and frication noise. Korean infants older than 7 months were able to reliably discriminate the fricative pair but younger infants did not show clear signs of such discrimination. These results add to the growing evidence that there are native sound contrasts infants cannot discriminate early on without a certain amount of language exposure, providing further data to help delineate the specific nature of early perceptual capacity.
Highlights
Past research on the development of speech perception suggests that infants’ perception goes through a reorganization during the first year of their lives
We predicted that Korean infants’ discrimination of fricative contrast would emerge in the enhancement pattern, based on previous studies in English. Our findings confirmed this prediction, and showed that Korean infants’ discrimination of the [sÃa]-[sa] contrast does emerge following the enhancement pattern. This adds to the growing evidence [9,10,11,12,13, 17, 18] that there are native phonemic contrasts that infants cannot discriminate at a young age but become able to discriminate as they grow older
Regarding the timing of when Korean infants’ discrimination ability emerges, we considered three alternative hypotheses: 1) Korean infants’ discrimination emerges earlier than that reported in English-learning infants, 2) Korean infants’ discrimination emerges later than English-learning infants’, and 3) they emerge at around the same time
Summary
Past research on the development of speech perception suggests that infants’ perception goes through a reorganization during the first year of their lives. In the most dominant pattern, infants discriminate non-native as well as native phonetic contrasts early on but become attuned to the sounds of their native language by the end of the first year. This pattern is referred to as the perceptual narrowing pattern [1,2,3]. A growing number of studies have shown that the development of infants’ sensitivity to some phonetic contrasts follows different patterns [9,10,11,12,13].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
