Modified spectral tilt affects infants' native-language discrimination of approximants and vowels

Beach, Elizabeth Francis; Noble, William; Kitamura, Christine

doi:10.1121/1.4929732

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…There is also evidence that infants show a particular sensitivity to lower-frequency acoustic cues. For example, early vowel and word learning has been claimed to be more dependent on the lowest vowel resonant frequencies (F1) than higher vowel resonances ( 10,11 ; see also 12 ), and that vowel learning may occur earlier than for higher-frequency consonant cues ( 3 ; cf 13 ). We still do not fully understand the interplay of acoustic environment, hearing maturation, and the development of speech perception in the first year of life.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of neural perceptual vowel spaces during the first year of life

McCarthy

Skoruppa

Iverson

2019

Sci Rep

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This study measured infants’ neural responses for spectral changes between all pairs of a set of English vowels. In contrast to previous methods that only allow for the assessment of a few phonetic contrasts, we present a new method that allows us to assess changes in spectral sensitivity across the entire vowel space and create two-dimensional perceptual maps of the infants’ vowel development. Infants aged four to eleven months were played long series of concatenated vowels, and the neural response to each vowel change was assessed using the Acoustic Change Complex (ACC) from EEG recordings. The results demonstrated that the youngest infants’ responses more closely reflected the acoustic differences between the vowel pairs and reflected higher weight to first-formant variation. Older infants had less acoustically driven responses that seemed a result of selective increases in sensitivity for phonetically similar vowels. The results suggest that phonetic development may involve a perceptual warping for confusable vowels rather than uniform learning, as well as an overall increasing sensitivity to higher-frequency acoustic information.

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