Speech perception in early infancy: Perceptual constancy for spectrally dissimilar vowel categories
Abstract
While numerous studies on infant perception demonstrate the infant’s ability to discriminate individual speech-sound pairs, very few demonstrate the infant’s ability to recognize the similarity among phonetic units when they occur in different phonetic contexts, in different positions in a syllable, or when they are spoken by different talkers. In two studies, six-month-old infants demonstrated the ability to distinguish two spectrally dissimilar vowel categories (/a/ and /i/) in which the vowel tokens were generated to simulate tokens produced by a male, a female, and a child talker. In experiment I, the infants were initially trained to discriminate the /a/ and /i/ tokens produced by the computer-simulated male voice. They were then gradually exposed to a number of novel tokens in a progressive transfer-of-learning task. In experiment II, the infants were initially trained to discriminate the same vowel contrast, but were then immediately tested with all of the tokens in both vowel categories. In both experiments the infants demonstrated rapid transfer of learning from the traning tokens produced by the male talker to the tokens produced by female and child talkers. Both experiments provide strong evidence that the six-month-old infant recognizes acoustic categories that conform to the vowel categories perceived by adult speakers of English.
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Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (2017) · Child Development · doi:10.1111/cdev.12888 · Cited by 83 · see citing works
“That they do so using synthesized speech or unfamiliar talkers implies that infants generalize across talkers under some conditions (Johnson, Seidl, & Tyler, 2014; Kuhl, 1979; Kuhl et al., 2006; Polka & Werker, 1994; van Heugten & Johnson, 2012; Werker & Tees, 1984, inter alia).”
BackgroundJeng, F.-C., Hu, J., Dickman, B., Montgomery-Reagan, K., Tong, M., Wu, G., & Lin, C.-D. (2011) · Ear and Hearing · doi:10.1097/aud.0b013e31821cc0df · Cited by 85 · see citing works
“Furthermore, by about 6 mo of age, infants can form equivalent classes of phonetic categories, despite the acoustic variation from different speakers, intonation, and phonetic context (Kuhl 1979, 1983; Kuhl et al. 2003).”
BackgroundOn Categorization in Early Infancy.
Quinn, P. C., & Eimas, P. D. (1986) · Merrill-palmer Quarterly · Cited by 83 · see citing works
The acoustic realization of vowels of Shanghai Chinese
Chen, Y. (2008) · Journal of Phonetics · doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2008.03.001 · Cited by 85 · see citing works
“First, the CSVs cannot be just reduced realization of OSVs, although CSVs were much shorter and short vowels are commonly realized with undershot vowel targets of their longer counterparts (Lindblom, 1963; see empirical support from Japanese (Keating & Huffman, 1984), Scottish Gaelic (Ladefoged, Ladefoged, Turk, Hind,…”
BackgroundVowel categorization by very young infants.
Marean, G. C., Werner, L. A., & Kuhl, P. K. (1992) · Developmental Psychology · doi:10.1037/0012-1649.28.3.396 · Cited by 82 · see citing works
Self-citationTwo-month-old infants’ sensitivity to allophonic differences
Hohne, E. A., & Jusczyk, P. W. (1994) · Perception & Psychophysics · doi:10.3758/bf03208355 · Cited by 81 · see citing works
The effect of talker variability on word recognition in preschool children.
Ryalls, B. O., & Pisoni, D. B. (1997) · Developmental Psychology · doi:10.1037/0012-1649.33.3.441 · Cited by 117 · see citing works
“Studies have shown that infants can discriminate between different speakers (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980; Jusczyk, Pisoni, & Mullennix, 1992) and can generalize speech sounds across different speakers (Kuhl, 1979, 1983).”
BackgroundCategorization in early infancy and the continuity of development
Eimas, P. D. (1994) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/0010-0277(94)90022-1 · Cited by 76 · see citing works
Young infants’ perception of liquid coarticulatory influences on following stop consonants
Fowler, C. A., Best, C. T., & McRoberts, G. W. (1990) · Perception & Psychophysics · doi:10.3758/bf03211602 · Cited by 75 · see citing works
Acquiring the phonology of lexical tone in infancy
Harrison, P. (2000) · Lingua · doi:10.1016/s0024-3841(00)00003-6 · Cited by 72 · see citing works
Meltzoff, A. N. (1993) · Advances in psychology · doi:10.1016/s0166-4115(08)60964-4 · Cited by 70 · see citing works
Classification of bimodal English and Spanish language passages by infants
Bahrick, L. E., & Pickens, J. N. (1988) · Infant Behavior and Development · doi:10.1016/0163-6383(88)90014-8 · Cited by 71 · see citing works
Miura, K., Yoshikawa, Y., & Asada, M. (2007) · Advanced Robotics · doi:10.1163/156855307782148596 · Cited by 70 · see citing works
“The supporting facts are partially observed in developmental psychology [12, 13].”
BackgroundMarkham, D., & Hazan, V. L. (2004) · Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research · doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2004/055 · Cited by 70 · see citing works
The Emergence of Perceptual Category Representations in Young Infants: A Connectionist Analysis
Quinn, P. C., & Johnson, M. H. (1997) · Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · doi:10.1006/jecp.1997.2385 · Cited by 70 · see citing works
“An operant headturning paradigm might be a viable training procedure by which to test these proposals (e.g., Husaim & Cohen, 1981; Kuhl, 1979).”
MethodThe encoding of rate and talker information during phonetic perception
Green, K. P., Tomiak, G. R., & Kuhl, P. K. (1997) · Perception & Psychophysics · doi:10.3758/bf03206015 · Cited by 69 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Kuhl, P. K.
- Affiliations
- University of Washington (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kuhl, Patricia K.
- ORCID
- Kuhl, Patricia K.
- Venue
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Publisher
- Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
- Published
- 1979-12-01
- Volume
- 66
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1668-1679
- ISSN
- 0001-4966 (ISSN-L)
- 1520-8524
- OpenAlex
- W1990351858
- Cited by
- 317
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 3.86
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health
- 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
- infant speech perception, perceptual constancy, vowel discrimination, transfer of learning, speaker variability, speaker identity, 6-month-old infants, phonetic categories
- MeSH terms
- Female, Humans, Infant, Male, Speech Acoustics, Speech Perception, Transfer, Psychology
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