Speech perception in early infancy: Perceptual constancy for spectrally dissimilar vowel categories

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Human infants (6 mo. old) demonstrated the ability to distinguish 2 spectrally dissimilar vowel categories in which the vowel tokens were generated to simulate tokens produced by a male, a female and a child talker. In experiment 1, the infants were initially trained to discriminate the /a/ and /i/ tokens produced by the computer-simulated male voice. They were then gradually exposed to a number of novel tokens in a progressive transfer-of-learning task. In experiment 2, the infants were initially trained to discriminate the same vowel contrast, but were then immediately tested with all of the tokens in both vowel categories. In both experiments the infants demonstrated rapid transfer of learning from the training tokens produced by the male talker to the tokens produced by female and child talkers. Both experiments provide strong evidence that the 6 mo. old infant recognizes acoustic categories that conform to the vowel categories perceived by adult speakers of English.

This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit: