Developmental Aspects of the Perception of Acoustic Cues in Determining the Voicing Feature of Final Stop Consonants

The developmental use of vowel duration, final transition and voicing during closure as cues to voicing in final stop consonants were investigated, using 10 three-year-old, 10 six-year-old and 10 adult subjects. The stimuli were alterations of eight stop-vowel-stop words. The presentation of each stimulus item was response contingent. The resulting data supported the ability of adults and children to use both temporal and spectral cues to acoustic/ phonetic distinctions. However, three-year olds relied more on temporal cues, six-year olds relied more on spectral cues, while adults used both spectral and temporal cues in judging the voicing feature of final stop consonants.