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Fourteen-month-olds’ sensitivity to acoustic salience in minimal pair word learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2018

Stephanie L. ARCHER  and
Suzanne CURTIN
Stephanie L. ARCHER*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta
Suzanne CURTIN
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object–word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants with acoustically salient contrasts (liquids) facilitates success in the Switch Task. The first two experiments demonstrate that acoustic differences boost infants’ detection of contrasts. However, infants cannot detect the contrast when the segments are digitally shortened. Thus, not all minimal contrasts are equally difficult, and the acoustic properties of a contrast matter in word learning.

Keywords

First Language AcquisitionWord LearningSpeech Perception
Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 5 , September 2018 , pp. 1198 - 1211
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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