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Speech discrimination in the language-innocent and the language-wise: a study in the perception of voice onset time*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Rebecca E. Eilers ,
Wesley R. Wilson  and
John M. Moore
Rebecca E. Eilers
Affiliation:
University of Miami
Wesley R. Wilson
Affiliation:
University of Washington
John M. Moore
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Abstract

Discrimination of synthetically produced stimuli differing along the voice onset time continuum was assessed for infants and adults within the context of the Visually Reinforced Infant Speech Discrimination (VRISD) paradigm. English-learning infants' discrimination abilities were compared with two groups of English-speaking adults (a phonetically naive and a phonetically sophisticated group). Contrary to the predictions of the innateness hypothesis, English-learning infants showed evidence of discrimination only across the English phoneme boundary. Adults, on the other hand, were very successful in discriminating both across and within a range of phoneme boundaries. These results are discussed in terms of the presumed relationship between categorical perception and linguistic processing and in terms of synthetic speech continua.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , February 1979 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by NICHD contract number HD-3-2793 at the Child Development and Mental Retardation Center at the University of Washington, and by NICHD grant number HD-09906-02 at the Mailman Center for Child Development at the University of Miami. The authors wish to express their appreciation to Dr Michael Dorman for providing the synthetic stimuli used in this study, and to Dr D. Kimbrough Oller for help with the preparation of this manuscript. Address for correspondence: Dr Rebecca E. Eilers, Mailman Center for Child Development, University of Miami, P.O. Box 520006 – Biscayne Annex, Miami, Florida 33152.

References

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