The Discrimination of Foreign Speech Contrasts by Infants and Adults

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Infants 5-17 wk of age were presented foreign speech sounds contingent upon their non-nutritive sucking. When the infants met a specified criterion of sucking decrement, a contrasting sound was substituted. Significant differences in response recovery for experimental vs. control (no sound change) subjects were found for the contrast pairs [pa]-[p~a] and [za]-[ra]. Adults were presented a comparable discrimination task for the foreign contrasts [za]-[ra] and the English contrasts [li]-[ri]. Adults achieved perfect accuracy with English contrasts but readily confused foreign contrasts. The implications of these results for theories of perceptual development were discussed.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: