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The Interplay Between Input and Initial Biases: Asymmetries in Vowel Perception During the First Year of Life
Author(s) -
Pons Ferran,
AlbaredaCastellot Bàrbara,
SebastiánGallés Núria
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01740.x
Subject(s) - psychology , vowel , perception , referent , speech perception , audiology , contrast (vision) , mid vowel , cognitive psychology , linguistics , formant , philosophy , neuroscience , artificial intelligence , computer science , medicine
Vowels with extreme articulatory‐acoustic properties act as natural referents. Infant perceptual asymmetries point to an underlying bias favoring these referent vowels. However, as language experience is gathered, distributional frequency of speech sounds could modify this initial bias. The perception of the /i/–/e/ contrast was explored in 144 Catalan‐ and Spanish‐learning infants (2 languages with a different distribution of vowel frequency of occurrence) at 4, 6, and 12 months. The results confirmed an acoustic bias at 4 and 6 months in all infants. However, at 12 months, discrimination was not affected by the acoustic bias but by the frequency of occurrence of the vowel.