Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Maye, J., Werker, J. F, & Gerken, L. Cognition, 82(3):B101-11, 2002.
doi  abstract   bibtex   
For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phonetic variation in the speech signal influences whether 6- and 8-month-old infants discriminate a pair of speech sounds. We familiarized infants with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting either a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. During the test phase, only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. These results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the input language, and that this sensitivity influences speech perception.
@Article{Maye2002,
  author   = {Jessica Maye and Janet F Werker and LouAnn Gerken},
  journal  = {Cognition},
  title    = {Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination.},
  year     = {2002},
  number   = {3},
  pages    = {B101-11},
  volume   = {82},
  abstract = {For nearly two decades it has been known that infants' perception
	of speech sounds is affected by native language input during the
	first year of life. However, definitive evidence of a mechanism to
	explain these developmental changes in speech perception has remained
	elusive. The present study provides the first evidence for such a
	mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phonetic
	variation in the speech signal influences whether 6- and 8-month-old
	infants discriminate a pair of speech sounds. We familiarized infants
	with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting either a
	bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. During the test phase,
	only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the
	endpoints of the continuum. These results demonstrate that infants
	are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in
	the input language, and that this sensitivity influences speech perception.},
  doi      = {10.1016/s0010-0277(01)00157-3},
  keywords = {Attention, Female, Humans, Infant, Language Development, Male, Mental Recall, Non-P.H.S., Non-U.S. Gov't, Phonetics, Psycholinguistics, Research Support, Speech Perception, U.S. Gov't, 11747867},
}

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