Discrimination of a word-final stop consonant voicing contrast, /bid/-/bit/, by 12 infants (6-8 and 10-12 months) and 6 adults was investigated in a category-change conditioned headturn procedure across three stimulus conditions: full cue (FC), burst and closure cues neutralized (BCCN), and vowel duration neutralized (VDN). Adults performed at ceiling levels for all three conditions. No infant age differences were observed. However, there was some evidence that infants benefitted from the presence of redundant acoustic cues (FC $>$ BCCN, but FC $ le$ VDN). Infants performed significantly better with the VDN stimuli indicating that final release burst information is more salient to infants than vowel duration differences for this /bid/-/bit/ contrast. This result differs from findings of prior research on adult and infant perception of such contrasts which showed a prominent use of the preceding vowel duration cue. This finding suggests that vowel duration becomes useful as a cue to final stop voicing with linguistic sophistication.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.55519 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | Orme, Margret A. (Margret Ann) |
| Contributors | Polka, Linda (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| 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 |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (School of Communication Sciences and Disorders.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001425963, proquestno: AAIMM00046, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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