Does a stop bias exist in infant consonant manner-of-articulation perception?

Abstract

Phoneme inventories are biased favoring stop over fricative consonants. A similar bias is evident in acquisition. For example, an asymmetrical pattern was observed when infant word learning was assessed using the switch task with stop-initial and fricative-initial minimal pair CVC nonsense syllables (Altvater-Mackensen & Fikkert, 2010). In this task, Dutch-learning fourteen-month-olds noticed a fricative to stop change but failed to detect a stop to fricative change. These findings were interpreted in terms of phonological representations emerging in early lexical development. In this study, we tested English and French infants aged 4-5 months to determine whether they show a perceptual bias favoring stop manner. We presented CVC nonsense syllables - /bas/ and /vas/- in a preference task using the look-to-listen procedure. The /b-v/ contrast is phonemic in English and French. Infants listened significantly longer to /bas/ than to /vas/ trials (p = .004). This perceptual preference cannot be explained in terms of phonological representations in young infants who are not yet producing stops or fricatives and have almost no receptive vocabulary. We will discuss this phonetic bias in light of adult data showing similar perceptual asymmetries and consider the implications for the development of infant speech processing and early word learning.