Developmental Changes in Perception of Nonnative Vowel Contrasts

Discrimination of 2 German vowel contrasts was examined in English-learning infants of 6-8 and 10-12 months of age using a head turn procedure. The younger infants were better able than the older infants to discriminate the nonnative contrasts, but performance at 6-8 months was below levels that hav...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 1994-04, Vol.20 (2), p.421-435
Main Authors: Polka, Linda, Werker, Janet F
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age Differences
Attention
Auditory Discrimination
Babies
Biological and medical sciences
Child development
Child language. Acquisition and development
Developmental psychology
English language
Female
Foreign Languages
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
German language
Human
Humans
Infant
Language
Language Development
Linguistics
Male
Newborn. Infant
Phonetics
Production and comprehension processes
Psycholinguistics
Psychology of language
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reference Values
Sensory perception
Social research
Sound Spectrography
Speech Acoustics
Speech Perception
Vowels
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Summary:Discrimination of 2 German vowel contrasts was examined in English-learning infants of 6-8 and 10-12 months of age using a head turn procedure. The younger infants were better able than the older infants to discriminate the nonnative contrasts, but performance at 6-8 months was below levels that have been reported for nonnative consonant contrasts. A 2nd experiment using a habituation looking procedure showed that 4-month-old infants discriminated both German vowel contrasts, but the 6-month-olds could not. The findings are consistent with previous consonant work, revealing a shift from a language-general toward a language-specific pattern during the 1st year of life. However, that shift begins earlier in development for vowels than for consonants.
ISSN:0096-1523
1939-1277
DOI:10.1037/0096-1523.20.2.421