Infants’ responses to spectral and temporal degradations of speech signals

The present study assessed the ability of 6-month-old infants with normal hearing (NH) to discriminate between voiced and unvoiced stop consonants (/aba/versus/apa/) using vocoded disyllables and the head-turn preference procedure. The disyllables were processed by 4- or 32-band noise-excited vocode...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2011-04, Vol.129 (4_Supplement), p.2591-2591
Main Authors: Cabrera, Laurianne, Bertoncini, Josiane, Lorenzi, Christian
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The present study assessed the ability of 6-month-old infants with normal hearing (NH) to discriminate between voiced and unvoiced stop consonants (/aba/versus/apa/) using vocoded disyllables and the head-turn preference procedure. The disyllables were processed by 4- or 32-band noise-excited vocoders in order to (i) degrade temporal fine structure (TFS) cues while preserving spectral- and temporal-envelope cues, (ii) degrade TFS and temporal-envelope cues (temporal envelopes being lowpass filtered at 16 Hz in each frequency band), and (iii) degrade TFS and spectral-envelope cues (temporal-envelope cues being preserved in four broad frequency bands). Overall, the results showed that infants are able to discriminate voicing in each experimental condition. These findings suggest that as adults, 6-month-old infants require minimal spectral information to achieve robust speech discrimination as long as slow (
ISSN:0001-4966
1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.3588580