Abstract
This study measured infants’ neural responses for spectral changes between all pairs of a set of English vowels. In contrast to previous methods that only allow for the assessment of a few phonetic contrasts, we present a new method that allows us to assess changes in spectral sensitivity across the entire vowel space and create two-dimensional perceptual maps of the infants’ vowel development. Infants aged four to eleven months were played long series of concatenated vowels, and the neural response to each vowel change was assessed using the Acoustic Change Complex (ACC) from EEG recordings. The results demonstrated that the youngest infants’ responses more closely reflected the acoustic differences between the vowel pairs and reflected higher weight to first-formant variation. Older infants had less acoustically driven responses that seemed a result of selective increases in sensitivity for phonetically similar vowels. The results suggest that phonetic development may involve a perceptual warping for confusable vowels rather than uniform learning, as well as an overall increasing sensitivity to higher-frequency acoustic information.
Highlights
Has been used for time-efficient hearing assessments in clinical situations for adults and children[22,23]
Infants each completed an average of 2879 trials during a testing session that lasted an average of eighteen minutes
Significant increases in sensitivity across the three age groups tended to be found for nearby vowel pairs along the vowel quadrilateral (e.g., /ɪ/-/ɛ/), and were less often present for more distant vowel pairs
Summary
Has been used for time-efficient hearing assessments in clinical situations for adults and children[22,23]. We used this time-efficiency to present many vowel pairs in a single experiment See Results Fig. 2) and tested 83 monolingual English infants aged four to eleven months old. We analysed to what extent these ACC responses were driven by low- and high-frequency spectral differences among the vowels, and used multidimensional scaling[24,25] to map how sensitivity to these vowel contrasts changed with age
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