Developmental Changes in Perception of Nonnative Vowel Contrasts

• 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
• ISSN: 0096-1523; 1939-1277
• DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.20.2.421

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.