Cardiac Indices of Infant Speech Perception: Orienting and Burst Discrimination

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Abstract
The present study investigated burst cue discrimination in 3- to 4-month-old infants with the natural speech stimuli [bu] and [gu]. The experimental stimuli consisted of either a [bu] or a [gu] burst attached to the formants of the [bu], such that the sole difference between the two stimuli was the initial burst cue. Infants were tested using a cardiac orienting response (OR) paradigm which consisted of 20 tokens of one stimulus (e.g. [bu]) followed by 20 tokens of the second syllable (20/20 paradigm). An OR to the stimulus change revealed that young infants can discriminate burst cue differences in speech stimuli. Discussion of the results focused on asymmetries observed in the data and the relationship of these findings to our previous failure to demonstrate burst discrimination using the habituation/dishabituation cardiac measure generally employed with older infants.