The equivalence of cues in the perception of speech by infants

doi:10.1016/S0163-6383(85)80001-1

Infant Behavior and Development

Volume 8, Issue 2, April–June 1985, Pages 125-138

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-6383(85)80001-1 Get rights and content

The perceptual equivalence of the temporal and spectral cues that differentiate the words say and stay was investigated in 2-, 3-, and 4-month-old infants. The specific values of the temporal and spectral cues were arranged within each member of the stimulus pairs to be discriminated so that they either “cooperated” or “conflicted” in the manner in which they signaled this stop-consonant manner contrast. The stimuli in pairs with cooperating cues were discriminated whereas stimuli differentiated by conflicting cues were not discriminated; both findings are in accord with the equivalence of cues hypothesis. The results also affirm the contention that the cues for speech derive their effectiveness, at least in part, from the manner in which they specify a categorical representation.

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Cited by (12)

When does native language input affect phonetic perception? The precocious case of lexical tone
2013, Journal of Memory and Language
Citation Excerpt :
The psychophysical properties of acoustic cues are not the only properties that likely contribute to perceptual salience. Phonetic contrasts are almost always cued by several acoustic properties, and the degree to which these cues are in concordance can often affect both infants’ (e.g., Eimas, 1985; Sato et al., 2012) and adults’ (see McMurray and Jongman (2011) for review) abilities to perceive phonetic contrasts. Future work will need to ask how a system of co-varying cues to a particular phonetic contrast contributes to perceptual salience in development.
Previous studies have suggested that the perception of vowels and consonants changes from language-universal to language-specific between 6 and 12 months of age. This report suggests that language-specific perception emerges even earlier for lexical tones. Experiment 1 tested English-learners’ perception of Cantonese tones, replicating declines in tone discrimination from 4 to 9 months of age. Experiment 2 tested infants learning non-native versus native tone systems (Mandarin-learners versus Cantonese-learners). All Chinese-learners discriminated the tones, but showed language-specific differences in tone preferences at both ages. Indeed, English-, Mandarin-, and Cantonese-learning 4-month-olds all exhibited distinct preferences. With other work, this shows that language-specific speech perception emerges over a more complex and extended schedule than previously thought: first for lexical stress and tone (<5 months), then vowels (6–8 months), consonants (8.5–12 months), and finally phoneme duration (18 months). Acoustic salience likely plays an important role in determining the timing of phonetic development.
Effects of the distribution of acoustic cues on infants' perception of sibilants
2011, Journal of Phonetics
Citation Excerpt :
Much research on subphonemic cues has focused on whether infants are able to discriminate when presented with a subset of cues, or whether the presence of multiple cues facilitates discrimination (e.g., burst spectrum and/or formant transitions as a cue to stop place; Miller, Morse, & Dorman, 1977; Moffitt, 1971; Walley, Pisoni, & Aslin, 1984; Williams & Bush, 1978; see also Jusczyk, 1981). Others have assessed whether infants compensate for subphonemic patterns (e.g., Eimas, 1985; Eimas & Miller, 1980a, 1991; Fowler, Best, & McRoberts, 1990; Levitt, Jusczyk, Murray, & Carden, 1988), in an attempt to see whether infants have innate access to gestural units (e.g., Fowler, 2006; Fowler et al., 1990), or whether such compensation responds to more basic auditory processes (e.g., Lotto, Kluender, & Holt, 1997; Lotto & Holt, 2006). Neither of these lines of research demonstrates developmental or experiential changes, so they do not bear on how infants learn multi-cue contrasts.
A current theoretical view proposes that infants converge on the speech categories of their native language by attending to frequency distributions that occur in the acoustic input. To date, the only empirical support for this statistical learning hypothesis comes from studies where a single, salient dimension was manipulated. Additional evidence is sought here, by introducing a less salient pair of categories supported by multiple cues. We exposed English-learning infants to a multi-cue bidimensional grid ranging between retroflex and alveolopalatal sibilants in prevocalic position. This contrast is substantially more difficult according to previous cross-linguistic and perceptual research, and its perception is driven by cues in both the consonantal and the following vowel portions. Infants heard one of two distributions (flat, or with two peaks), and were tested with sounds varying along only one dimension. Infants' responses differed depending on the familiarization distribution, and their performance was equally good for the vocalic and the frication dimension, lending some support to the statistical hypothesis even in this harder learning situation. However, learning was restricted to the retroflex category, and a control experiment showed that lack of learning for the alveolopalatal category was not due to the presence of a competing category. Thus, these results contribute fundamental evidence on the extent and limitations of the statistical hypothesis as an explanation for infants' perceptual tuning.
Cerebellar contributions to the perception of temporal cues within the speech and nonspeech domain
1999, Brain and Language
A previous study (Ackermann, Gräber, Hertrich, & Daum, 1997) reported impaired phoneme identification in cerebellar disorders, provided that categorization depended on temporal cues. In order to further clarify the underlying mechanism of the observed deficit, the present study performed a discrimination and identification task in cerebellar patients using two-tone sequences of variable pause length. Cerebellar dysfunctions were found to compromise the discrimination of time intervals extending in duration from 10 to 150 ms, a range covering the length of acoustic speech segments. In contrast, categorization of the same stimuli as a “short” or “long pause” turned out to be unimpaired. These findings, along with the data of the previous investigation, indicate, first, that the cerebellum participates in the perceptual processing of speech and nonspeech stimuli and, second, that this organ might act as a back-up mechanism, extending the storage capacities of the “auditory analyzer” extracting temporal cues from acoustic signals.
Infant Speech Perception: Processing Characteristics, Representational Units, and The Learning of Words
1997, Psychology of Learning and Motivation - Advances in Research and Theory
Infants' perception of timbre: Classification of complex tones by spectral structure
1990, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Infants 7 to 8.5 months of age were tested for their discrimination of timbre or sound quality differences in the context of variable exemplars. They were familiarized with a set of complex tones with specified spectral structure; members of the set varied in fundamental frequency, intensity, or duration. Infants were then tested for their detection of tones that contrasted in spectral structure but were similar in other respects. They successfully differentiated the two spectral structures in the context of these variations, indicating that they can classify tonal stimuli on the basis of timbre. When the stimuli were organized into arbitrary categories, infants were unable to differentiate these categories, indicating that their performance with nonarbitrary categories was not attributable to memorization of the familiarized set.
Only the right noise? Effects of phonetic and visual input variability on 14-month-olds' minimal pair word learning
2020, Developmental Science

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^*: This research was supported by Grant HD 05331-14 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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The equivalence of cues in the perception of speech by infants*

Cognition

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Perceptual equivalence of acoustic cues in speech and nonspeech perception

Perception & Psychophysics

Short-term release cues to stop-consonant place of articulation in child speech

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Four assumptions about invariance in perception

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Auditory and linguistic processing of cues for place of articulation by infants

Perception & Psychophysics

Contextual effects in infant speech perception

Science

Perceptual equivalence of two acoustic cues for stop-consonant manner

Perception & Psychophysics

Pitch as a voicing cue

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Infant speech perception: A critical appraisal