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Assessing the role of experience on infants' speech discrimination*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Kristine S. MacKain
Kristine S. MacKain
Affiliation:
Cornell University Medical College
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Abstract

Several studies have investigated the effect of a particular linguistic environment on infants' discrimination of voicing for stop consonants. Exposure to contrasts phonemic for a community has been said to heighten preverbal infants' sensitivity to these contrasts.

This paper argues that phonetic input cannot be specified and ‘experience’ cannot be defined in this context without knowing how infants perceptually structure speech input. Consequently, the discrimination paradigm provides no test for the effect of experience on infants' speech discrimination. The conditions to be met in order to conclude an effect of experience are outlined.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , October 1982 , pp. 527 - 542
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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Footnotes

[*]

This paper was originally presented as a lecture to a seminar on perception in infancy at the Rockefeller University, Spring 1978. This research was supported by a research fellowship awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NICHHD Award 2 F32 HD-05047-03). I would like to thank Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Roy D. Pea for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Address for correspondence: Department of Psychiatry, Cornell University Medical College, 525 E. 68th Street, New York, N.Y. 10021.

References

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