Abstract
The present study assessed the ability of 6-month-old infants with normal hearing (NH) to discriminate between voiced and unvoiced stop consonants (/aba/versus/apa/) using vocoded disyllables and the head-turn preference procedure. The disyllables were processed by 4- or 32-band noise-excited vocoders in order to (i) degrade temporal fine structure (TFS) cues while preserving spectral- and temporal-envelope cues, (ii) degrade TFS and temporal-envelope cues (temporal envelopes being lowpass filtered at 16 Hz in each frequency band), and (iii) degrade TFS and spectral-envelope cues (temporal-envelope cues being preserved in four broad frequency bands). Overall, the results showed that infants are able to discriminate voicing in each experimental condition. These findings suggest that as adults, 6-month-old infants require minimal spectral information to achieve robust speech discrimination as long as slow (<16 Hz) temporal-envelope cues are available in a few spectral regions. These findings also suggest that the impoverished spectral and temporal cues delivered by current cochlear implants processors can be used by 6-month-old infants to discriminate speech sounds.
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