An Electrophysiological Study of Infants' Sensitivity to the Sound Patterns of English Speech

Valerie L. Shafer · David W. Shucard · Janet L. Shucard · LouAnn Gerken

137 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Speech Language and Hearing Research

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Language Development and Disorders Phonetics and Phonology Research Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Abstract

The study explores 10- to 11-month-old infants' sensitivity to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained for tones that were superimposed on two versions of a story: an Unmodified version containing normal English function morphemes, and a Modified version in which the prosodic and segmental properties of a subset of function morphemes were changed to make them atypical. The 11-month-olds exhibited significantly lower amplitude ERPs to the tones during the Modified story than to the Unmodified story, whereas the 10-month-olds showed no differences. These results suggest that the 11-month-olds discriminated the two versions of the story based on their representations of the phonological properties of English. Further, the tone-probe ERP method can successfully be used to study the development of speech perception in the pre-linguistic infant.

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