2007/03/07

Werker, J. F. & Tees, R. C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 7, 49–63.

Presentation: Sally
Summary: Angela

In the article, the authors first introduced one of their previous studies which was about the effect of age on recognizing phonetic contrasts that do not appear in one’s own native tongue. This previous study on English infants, English adults, and Hindi adults showed that infants could discriminate phonetic contrasts that did not belong to their native language, whereas their adult counterparts could not. It was also found that even children of age four seemed to have lost their ability in discriminating speech sounds that were non-native to them. Since this previous study was only done on two specific languages, the authors thought that it might be useful to do the same experiment on other languages as well to see if the results their found in their previous experiment were universal. Also, since only a few age groups were looked upon during the previous experiment, it was hard for the authors to pinpoint the exact age in which the ability of discriminating non-native sounds declined. Therefore, a longitudinal study was conducted. The results of these experiments showed that young infants did indeed have the ability to discriminate non-native sounds cross linguistically without relevant experiences. This indicates that infants do indeed have the ability to discriminate non-native speech sounds. The other finding of this experiment was that the ability to discriminate non-native speech sounds declined by the end of the first year of life.