Developmental speech perception of three acoustic cues associated with place of articulation

Abstract

In this experiment, 30 children and 10 adults participated in three speech perception tasks: discrimination, labeling, and adaptation. Stimuli were four sets of synthetic CV syllables, varying along a bilabial‐to‐alveolar, place‐of‐articulation continuum. The primary acoustic cue in each continuum was the change in slope of the F2–F3 transitions. The continua were constructed so that two had transition lengths of 45 ms, and two of 95 ms. Two continua contained a 5‐ms burst, and two were burstless. The discrimination task was a change‐no change procedure, in which subjects indicated whether a set of four stimuli remained the same or changed. Results indicated a complex developmental pattern. For discrimination, there was a progression in response strategy and sensitivity with increasing age. In contrast, labeling performance was similar for all subjects. Finally, only the adult subjects showed significant adaptation effects. Children's responses were essentially unchanged after adaptation. Further, transit...