The equivalence of cues in the perception of speech by infants

The perceptual equivalence of the temporal and spectral cues that differentiate the words say and stay was investigated in 2-, 3-, and 4-month-old infants. The specific values of the temporal and spectral cues were arranged within each member of the stimulus pairs to be discriminated so that they either “cooperated” or “conflicted” in the manner in which they signaled this stop-consonant manner contrast. The stimuli in pairs with cooperating cues were discriminated whereas stimuli differentiated by conflicting cues were not discriminated; both findings are in accord with the equivalence of cues hypothesis. The results also affirm the contention that the cues for speech derive their effectiveness, at least in part, from the manner in which they specify a categorical representation.

[1]  L. Lisker,et al.  Letter: Is it VOT or a first-formant transition detector? , 1975, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[2]  C G Wolf,et al.  The perception of stop consonants by children. , 1973, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[3]  Catherine T. Best,et al.  Perceptual equivalence of acoustic cues in speech and nonspeech perception , 1981, Perception & psychophysics.

[4]  P. Kuhl.  Speech perception in early infancy: perceptual constancy for spectrally dissimilar vowel categories. , 1979, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[5]  M. Haggard,et al.  Pitch as a voicing cue. , 1970, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[6]  P. Morse,et al.  The categorization of male and female voices in infancy , 1982 .

[7]  Peter D. Eimas,et al.  Auditory and linguistic processing of cues for place of articulation by infants , 1974 .

[8]  J E Cutting,et al.  Four assumptions about invariance in perception. , 1983, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[9]  Alvin M. Liberman,et al.  On Pushing the Voice-Onset-Time (Vot) Boundary About , 1977 .

[10]  P. D. Eimas,et al.  Studies on the categorization of speech by infants , 1983, Cognition.

[11]  W. Gavin,et al.  The perception of the sound of silence in early infancy. , 1982, Child Development.

[12]  P Lieberman,et al.  Short-term release cues to stop-consonant place of articulation in child speech. , 1982, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[13]  A M Liberman,et al.  Perceptual equivalence of two acoustic cues for stop-consonant manner , 1980, Perception & psychophysics.

[14]  Q. Summerfield,et al.  On the dissociation of spectral and temporal cues to the voicing distinction in initial stop consonants. , 1977, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[15]  B. C. Griffith,et al.  The discrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries. , 1957, Journal of experimental psychology.

[16]  B. Repp.  Phonetic trading relations and context effects : new experimental evidence for a speech mode of perception , 1982 .

[17]  J D Miller,et al.  Speech perception by the chinchilla: identification function for synthetic VOT stimuli. , 1978, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[18]  P D Eimas,et al.  Contextual effects in infant speech perception. , 1980, Science.

[19]  A. Liberman,et al.  Some Cues for the Distinction Between Voiced and Voiceless Stops in Initial Position , 1958 .

[20]  D. Pisoni,et al.  Perception of the duration of rapid spectrum changes in speech and nonspeech signals , 1983, Perception & psychophysics.