Discriminiationi of synthetic speech sounds was studied in 1- and 4-month-old infants. The speech sounds varied along an acoustic dimension previously shown to cue phonemic distinctions among the voiced and voiceless stop consonants in adults. Discriminability was measured by an increase in conditioned response rate to a second speech sound after habituation to the first speech sound. Recovery from habituation was greater for a given acoustic difference when the two stimuli were from different adult phonemic categories than when they were from the same category. The discontinuity in discrimination at the region of the adult phonemic boundary was taken as evidence for categorical perception.

The paired-preference procedure was used in a series of experiments to explore the abilities of infants aged 3 and 4 months to categorize photographic exemplars from natural (adult-defined) basic-level categories. The question of whether the categorical representations that were evidenced excluded members of a related, perceptually similar category was also investigated. Experiments 1-3 revealed that infants could form categorical representations for dogs and cats that excluded birds. Experiment 4 showed that the representation for cats also excluded dogs, but that the representation for dogs did not exclude cats. However, a supplementary experiment showed that the representation for dogs did exclude cats when the variability of the dog exemplars was reduced to match that of the cat exemplars. The results are discussed in terms of abilities necessary for the formation of more complex categorical representations.

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