Previous research in cross-language speech perception has shown that English-learning infants at 6--8 months of age and younger can discriminate both native and non-native consonant contrasts. However, by 10--12 months of age, infants' discrimination performance becomes more like that of adults in that they show difficulty discriminating non-native, but not native phonetic contrasts. In the present study, infants (6- to 8- and 10- to 12-months-old) and adults from two language environments (French and English) were compared on their perception of two English stop-fricative contrasts, /b - v/ and /d - th /. The present findings show trends that replicate patterns of results observed in previous developmental cross-language studies, supporting the conclusion that phonetic perception shifts from a language-general to a language-specific direction within the first year of life. The findings illustrate the benefits of conducting direct language comparisons and using similar test procedures across different age groups when studying speech perception development.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.20565 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Colantonio, Connie. |
| 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: 001604930, proquestno: MQ44151, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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