Respect the surroundings: Effects of phonetic context variability on infants' learning of minimal pairs.

Barbara Höhle,Adamantios Gafos,Marc Hullebus,Natalie Boll-Avetisyan,Tom Fritzsche

doi:10.1121/10.0003574

Abstract

Fourteen-month-olds' ability to distinguish a just learned word, /buːk/, from its minimally different word, /duːk/, was assessed under two pre-exposure conditions: one where /b, d/-initial forms occurred in a varying vowel context and another where the vowel was fixed but the final consonant varied. Infants in the experiments benefited from the variable vowel but not from the variable final consonant context, suggesting that vowel variability but not all kinds of variability are beneficial. These results are discussed in the context of time-honored observations on the vowel-dependent nature of place of articulation cues for consonants.

Highlights

One of the major challenges young infants face when learning their native language(s) is to find out which acoustic properties of speech are relevant in the phonological system of the language they hear and which are not
We tested the hypothesis that infants benefit from information provided by variable vocalic contexts in establishing consonantal contrasts. This hypothesis was supported by our results as infants familiarized with the varying vowel context but not infants familiarized with the varying final consonant context responded with longer looking times in the test phase when presented with a label in which the two consonants had been exchanged
Our findings demonstrate that, in detecting the phonologically relevant sound distinctions in their language, infants can make use of specific acoustic properties in their speech input

Summary

Introduction

One of the major challenges young infants face when learning their native language(s) is to find out which acoustic properties of speech are relevant in the phonological system of the language they hear and which are not. The basic idea is that infants cluster sounds onto an acoustic space defined by a set of phonetic dimensions: exemplars whose phonetic parameters have a high frequency of occurrence serve as central instances of a category with less frequent but acoustically similar exemplars grouped around such distributional peaks (e.g., Maye et al, 2002). This reconstruction of the acoustic space paves the way to language-specific phonological categories, which in turn leads to the emergence of language-specific effects on speech perception (e.g., Werker and Tees, 1984). This perceptual attunement happens during the first year of life, which suggests that infants may rely on a relatively stable system of native phonological categories for word learning

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