Abstract
Infant phonetic perception reorganizes in accordance with the native language by 10 months of age. One mechanism that may underlie this perceptual change is distributional learning, a statistical analysis of the distributional frequency of speech sounds. Previous distributional learning studies have tested infants of 6-8 months, an age at which native phonetic categories have not yet developed. Here, three experiments test infants of 10 months to help illuminate perceptual ability following perceptual reorganization. English-learning infants did not change discrimination in response to nonnative speech sound distributions from either a voicing distinction (Experiment 1) or a place-of-articulation distinction (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, familiarization to the place-of-articulation distinction was doubled to increase the amount of exposure, and in this case infants began discriminating the sounds. These results extend the processes of distributional learning to a new phonetic contrast, and reveal that at 10 months of age, distributional phonetic learning remains effective, but is more difficult than before perceptual reorganization.
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