The development of cross-language speech perception

Abstract

The present research was designed to determine whether infant speech perception capabilities can be explained by acoustic categorization, or whether phonetic (or at least phonetically relevant) categories must be inferred. A 16-step, synthetic place-of-articulation continuum was used. Preliminary testing showed that adult English speakers divide this continuum into two categories, /ba/-/da/, and adult Hindi speakers divide it into three categories, /ba/-/da/-/da/. Infants aged 6–8 and 11–13 months were compared to Hindi- and English-speaking adults on their ability to discriminate multiple exemplars from either side of one of three boundary locations: “Both”—the English and Hindi front/mid-boundary; “Hindi only”—the Hindi dental/retroflex boundary; and “Neither”—an arbitrary point in the “da” end of the continuum that no language uses to differentiate meaning. Results showed that young infants and Hindi adults could categorize stimuli at the “Both” and “Hindi-only” locations but not at the “Neither,” but that older infants and English adults could only use the “Both” boundary. These results show the phonetic relevance of initial infant speech perception capabilities, and further demonstrate that these capabilities are reorganized during the first year of life into language-specific phonemic categories. [Work supported by NSERC.]