In speech perception tasks young infants show remarkable
sensitivity to fine phonetic detail. Despite this impressive ability
demonstrated at early ages, studies of word learning in young toddlers
indicate that they have difficulty learning similar-sounding words. This
evidence suggests that infants may not be using this speech-perception
ability as they begin to learn words. The studies in this thesis were
designed to test how infants' speech-perception skills are used in the early
stages of word learning.
Using a simple habituation procedure, we have shown in earlier
work that 14-month-old infants, but not younger infants, are able to learn
the association between novel nonsense words and objects (Werker,
Cohen, Lloyd, Casasola, & Stager, 1998). The current series of experiments
used this simple habituation procedure to test whether infants use
minimally contrastive phonetic detail in the very early stages of word
learning.
In this thesis, I show that 14-month-old infants, who are on the
cusp of word learning, while still able to discriminate phonetically-similar
words in a speech perception task, do not incorporate minimally
contrastive phonetic detail when first forming word-object associations.
Infants of 8 months of age do, however, appear to use fine phonetic detail
in a similar task. Taken together, these results suggest a decline in the
phonetic detail used by infants as they move from processing speech to
learning words. I hypothesize that this decline may occur as infants move
from treating the task as one of speech perception to treating the task as
one of word learning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10959 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Stager, Christine Louise |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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