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Infants make their first contacts with their native language through its sound patterns. Research over the past twenty years has demonstrated that infants are well-equipped to perceive subtle distinctions in speech sounds and to cope with the variability that is present in the speech signal. At the same time, it is clear that in order to progress in acquiring a language, infants need to learn about the particular characteristics of the sounds and combinations of sounds that are used in their native language. Recent findings suggest that the time between 6 and 9 months of age may be a particularly fertile one for learning about the sound patterns of one's native language. There are indications that infants are developing sensitivity to distributional properties of sounds in the input at this time. The implications of these findings have for our understanding of processes underlying language acquisition will be considered.

Investigates whether English learners give evidence of observing markedness and faithfulness constraints relating to nasal place assimilation. Employs the Headturn Preference Procedure to introduce a general experimental paradigm for exploring infants phonological grammars. (Author/VWL)

The study to examine whether 4.5-month-olds like to hear their own names over foils that were either similar or dissimilar in stress pattern showed that the young infants identify the sound patterns of their own names. Infants prefer their names in comparison to the foils that have the same stress patterns as well as foils with reverse patterns. The findings suggest that very young infants already start to identify sound patterns usually spoken in the infant's environments.

Previous studies have shown that infants discriminate voice onset time (VOT) differences for certain speech contrasts categorically. In addition, investigations of nonspeech processing by infants also yield evidence of categorical discrimination of temporal-order differences. These findings have led some researchers to argue that common auditory mechanisms underlie the infant's discrimination of timing differences in speech and nonspeech contrasts [e.g., Jusczyk et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67, 262-270 (1980)]. Nevertheless, some discrepancies in the location of the infant's category boundaries for different kinds of contrasts have been noted [e.g., Eilers et al. (1980)]. Because different procedures were used to study the different kinds of contrasts, interpretation of the discrepancies between the studies has been difficult. In the present study, three different continua were examined: [ba]-[pa] stimuli, which differed in VOT; [du]-[tu] stimuli, which differed in VOT but which lacked format transitions; nonspeech formant onset time (FOT) stimuli that varied in the time that lower harmonics increased in amplitude. An experiment with adults indicated a close match between the perceptual boundaries for the three series. Similarly, tests with 2-month-old infants using high amplitude sucking procedure yielded estimates of perceptual category boundaries at between 20 and 40 ms for all three stimulus series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal of research has focused on the perception of voice onset time (VOT) differences in stop consonants. Yet, the nature of the mechanisms responsible for the perception of these differences is still the subject of much debate. Recently Pisoni [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 61, 1352-1361 (1977)] has presented evidence which suggested that the perception of VOT differences by adult listeners may reflect a basic limitation on processing temporal order information by the auditory system. For adults, stimuli with onset differences approximately greater than 20 ms are perceived as successive events (either leading or lagging), while stimuli with onset differences less than about 20 ms are perceived as simultaneous events. Thus, differences in voicing may have an underlying perceptual basis in terms of three well-defined temporal attributes corresponding to leading, lagging, or simultaneous events at onset. The present experiment was carried out to determine whether young infants can discriminate differences in temporal order information in nonspeech signals and whether their discrimination performance parallels the earlier data obtained with adults. Discrimination was measured with the high-amplitude sucking (HAS) procedure. The results indicated that infants can discriminate differences in the relative onset of two events; the pattern of discrimination also suggested the presence of three perceptual categories along this temporal continuum although the precise alignment of these categories differed somewhat from the values found in the earlier study with adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]