Cross-language speech perception: Initial capabilities and developmental change.
Abstract
This article reports three studies designed to increase our understanding of developmental changes in cross-language speech perception. In the first study, we compared adult speakers of English and Hindi on their ability to discriminate pairings from a synthetic voiced, unaspirated place-of-articula-tion continuum. Results indicated that English listeners discriminate two categories (ba vs. (Ja), whereas Hindi listeners discriminate three (ba vs. da, and da vs. Da). We then used stimuli from within this continuum in the next two experiments to determine (a) if our previously reported find-ing (Werker & Tees, 1984a) of a reorganization between 6 and 12 months of life from "universal " to "language-specific " phonetic perception would be evident using synthetic (rather than natural) stim-uli in which the physical variability within and between categories could be controlled, and (b) whether the younger infants ' sensitivity to nonnative speech contrasts is best explained by reference to the phonetic relevance or the physical similarity of the stimuli. In addition to replicating the developmental reorganization, the results indicate that infant speech perception is phonetically rele-vant. We discuss the implications of these results. Since the early 1970s researchers have been studying infant speech perception, partly in an attempt to determine if there is evidence for a specialized phonetic mode of processing among infants. In a now-classic study, Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, and Vigorito (1971) demonstrated that English-learning infants aged 1 to 4 months show far better discrimination along a syn-thetic voice onset time (VOT) continuum for two stimuli that straddle the adult /ba/-/pa / phonetic category boundary than they do for two equally acoustically distinct stimuli from within
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Infants between 1 and 4 months can perceive the phoneme contrasts of every possible language, but by the end of their first year they can only distinguish the contrasts of their own language.
“Infants between 1 and 4 months of age can perceive the phoneme contrasts of every possible language, but by the end of their first year, they can only distinguish the contrasts of their own ~Werker & Lalonde, 1988; Werker & Tees, 1984!+”
From AT THE INTERFACE: DYNAMIC INTERACTIONS OF EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE (2005) · cites this paper as Werker & Lalonde, 1988
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- Authors
- Werker, J. F., & Lalonde, C. E.
- Affiliations
- University of British Columbia (CA)
- ORCID
- Werker, Janet F.
- Venue
- Developmental Psychology
- Published
- 1988-09
- Volume
- 24
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 672-683
- ISSN
- 0012-1649 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-0599
- OpenAlex
- W2156909242
- Cited by
- 607
- References
- 8
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 43 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 35 · 2019: 15 · 2018: 43 · 2017: 16 · 2016: 27 · 2015: 18 · 2014: 18 · 2013: 24 · 2012: 35
- FWCI
- 5.76
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Developmental Psychology (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Keywords
- cross-language speech perception, infant speech perception, phonetic bootstrapping, English language, physical similarity, synthetic speech stimuli
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