Fourteen-month-olds’ sensitivity to acoustic salience in minimal pair word learning

During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object–word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child language 2018-09, Vol.45 (5), p.1198-1211
Main Authors: ARCHER, Stephanie L., CURTIN, Suzanne
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Auditory Perception
Auditory Stimuli
Brief Research Reports
Child Language
Infants
Language Acquisition
Liquids
Monolingualism
Native Language
Native language acquisition
Native Speakers
Novelty (Stimulus Dimension)
Phonemes
Phonology
Salience
Speech Communication
Standard deviation
Stimuli
Syllables
Task Analysis
Vocabulary Development
Vocabulary learning
Vowels
Young Children
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Summary:During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object–word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants with acoustically salient contrasts (liquids) facilitates success in the Switch Task. The first two experiments demonstrate that acoustic differences boost infants’ detection of contrasts. However, infants cannot detect the contrast when the segments are digitally shortened. Thus, not all minimal contrasts are equally difficult, and the acoustic properties of a contrast matter in word learning.
ISSN:0305-0009
1469-7602
DOI:10.1017/S0305000917000617