TY - JOUR
T1 - Word-level information influences phonetic learning in adults and infants
AU - Feldman, Naomi H.
AU - Myers, Emily B.
AU - White, Katherine S.
AU - Griffiths, Thomas L.
AU - Morgan, James L.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Lori Rolfe for assistance in running participants, Andy Wallace for assistance in making the vowel continuum, and Sheila Blumstein, members of the Metcalf Infant Research Lab, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. This research was supported by NSF Grant BCS-0924821 and NIH Grant HD032005 . Portions of this work were presented at the 35th Boston University Conference on Language Development, the 3rd Northeast Computational Phonology workshop, and the 18th International Conference on Infant Studies.
PY - 2013/6
Y1 - 2013/6
N2 - Infants begin to segment words from fluent speech during the same time period that they learn phonetic categories. Segmented words can provide a potentially useful cue for phonetic learning, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore the contexts in which sounds appear. We present two experiments to show that, contrary to the assumption that phonetic learning occurs in isolation, learners are sensitive to the words in which sounds appear and can use this information to constrain their interpretation of phonetic variability. Experiment 1 shows that adults use word-level information in a phonetic category learning task, assigning acoustically similar vowels to different categories more often when those sounds consistently appear in different words. Experiment 2 demonstrates that 8-month-old infants similarly pay attention to word-level information and that this information affects how they treat phonetic contrasts. These findings suggest that phonetic category learning is a rich, interactive process that takes advantage of many different types of cues that are present in the input.
AB - Infants begin to segment words from fluent speech during the same time period that they learn phonetic categories. Segmented words can provide a potentially useful cue for phonetic learning, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore the contexts in which sounds appear. We present two experiments to show that, contrary to the assumption that phonetic learning occurs in isolation, learners are sensitive to the words in which sounds appear and can use this information to constrain their interpretation of phonetic variability. Experiment 1 shows that adults use word-level information in a phonetic category learning task, assigning acoustically similar vowels to different categories more often when those sounds consistently appear in different words. Experiment 2 demonstrates that 8-month-old infants similarly pay attention to word-level information and that this information affects how they treat phonetic contrasts. These findings suggest that phonetic category learning is a rich, interactive process that takes advantage of many different types of cues that are present in the input.
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Phonetic category learning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84875866811&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84875866811&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.007
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.007
M3 - Article
C2 - 23562941
AN - SCOPUS:84875866811
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 127
SP - 427
EP - 438
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 3
ER -