Fine-grained Variation in Caregivers' /s/ Predicts Their Infants' /s/ Category

Overview

Journal J Acoust Soc Am

Publisher American Institute of Physics

Specialty Otorhinolaryngology

Date 2011 May 17

PMID 21568428

Citations 19

Authors

Alejandrina Cristia

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Within the debate on the mechanisms underlying infants' perceptual acquisition, one hypothesis proposes that infants' perception is directly affected by the acoustic implementation of sound categories in the speech they hear. In consonance with this view, the present study shows that individual variation in fine-grained, subphonemic aspects of the acoustic realization of /s/ in caregivers' speech predicts infants' discrimination of this sound from the highly similar /∫/, suggesting that learning based on acoustic cue distributions may indeed drive natural phonological acquisition.

Citing Articles

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