Abstract
Two experiments using a visual habituation paradigm examined 71/2 month-old infants' categorical discrimination of the medial stop consonants /aba/ and /apa/. Infants received digitized natural speech tokens differing in the duration of consonantal closure and in the presence or absence of vocal-fold pulsing. The results provided clear evidence of infant categorical discrimination based solely on closure duration. Infants also shifted their boundary (toward shorter closure durations) if they received pulsing during habituation. A trading relation between closure duration and pulsing was also obtained. Three different quantitative models of infant speech perception were examined. A composite model incorporating categorical discrimination, the boundary shift, and the trading relation produced excellent predictions of infant performance. Application of this model to other aspects of infant speech perception was discussed
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