Infant place discrimination of voiced stop consonants with and without release bursts

Abstract

A number of studies have shown that infants as young as one month of age are able to detect changes in place of articulation among the voiced stop consonants in English [Moffitt, 1971; Morse, 1972; Eimas, 1974]. In each of these studies, the stimuli were three-formant synthetic patterns in which the desired place changes were realized by manipulating the starting frequencies of the F2 and F3 transitions. The present experiment was designed to examine the infant's ability to use the additional acoustic information provided by the consonantal release burst in making the /d-g/ place distinction. Infants between six and twelve weeks of age were tested using the HAS (high-amplitude sucking) procedure. Two pairs of synthetic, five-formant /da/-/ga/ syllables (with and without the appropriate d or g bursts) were used as stimuli. The experimental data show that, although infants are able to discriminate both sets of syllables, evidence for discrimination is greater for stimuli with bursts. This finding suggests that increasing the acoustic contrast between two stimuli will facilitate place discrimination by infants—perhaps by enhancing the integrated spectral properties characteristic of the individual stop consonants. [Work supported by NICHD.]