Speech perception
Speech perception
• How do infants perceive speech?
• What kind of perceptual abilities do infants
have?
– Are they born with the ability to discriminate
speech?
– Or, does this ability develop over time with
exposure to speech?
Speech perception
• One part of speech perception is
distinguishing phonemes of the language
(e.g., [p] and [b])
• Phonemes are meaningful speech sounds
in a language
• If you change one phoneme for another,
you will generally change the meaning of
the word
Speech perception
• Different languages have different
phonemes
• /p/ and /b/ in English
• /p/, /ph/ and /b/ in Thai
• /b/ in Arabic
Speech perception
• Speech perception also involves:
– perceiving sounds as speech, ignoring other
unwanted sounds in the background
– segmenting the speech stream into words
• Harder than it looks: Lack of segmentation
of sounds
– Father: Who wants some mango for dessert?
– Child: What’s a semmango?
Speech perception
• Human speech is extremely rapid
– 125-180 words/minute
– 5-6 syllables/second
• Humans can recognize most words in
less than 125 ms after their onset
– 20 phonemes/second
– But nonspeech sounds: only 7-9
items/second
Infant speech perception
• What are the speech perception abilities of
infants?
– Are infants born with certain speech
perception abilities?
– And/or do certain abilities develop over time
and exposure to the ambient language?
• How can we determine infants’ speech
perception abilities?
Infant speech perception
• What infants do:
– They look longer at new stimuli compared to
familiar stimuli
– They suck faster on a pacifier when exposed
to new stimuli than when exposed to familiar
ones
• How is this of any use?
Conditioned head turn
• If infants can discriminate between very
similar speech sounds at an early age, this
would suggest either that they have a
built-in ability to make such distinctions
or that they learn them very quickly
Questions
• Can infants growing up in an English-speaking
environment distinguish phonemes of English
(e.g., /b/ and /p/)?
• Can they distinguish phonemes of other
languages (e.g., [p] and [ph])?
• If they can distinguish [p] and [p h], when do they
lose this ability? (recall that adult native
speakers of English cannot distinguish this pair)
• Why would infants lose the ability to distinguish
certain speech sounds?
Infant vs. adult speech perception
• Werker et al. (1981) tested:
– 20 English-speaking adults
– 5 Hindi-speaking adults
– 12 infants aged 6-8 months who had
only been exposed to English
Infant vs. adult speech perception
• Tested subjects’ abilities to discriminate
pairs of phonemes:
– One pair found in English (/ba/-/da/)
– One pair found in Hindi (but not in English,
unaspirated dental stop /t̪a/ vs. unaspirated
post-alveolar stop / ʈa/)
– Another pair found in Hindi (but not in English,
aspirated dental stop / t̪ ha/ vs. aspirated post-
alveolar stop / ʈha/)
Infant vs. adult speech perception
• Werker and Tees (1983) used the same two
Hindi contrasts to test native English-
speaking children at three different age-
levels: 4-, 8- and 12-year-olds
• All three groups of children performed just
as badly as the adults
– Ability to distinguish sounds not found in the
native language appears to be lost early
– How early is it lost?
Infant vs. adult speech perception
• Werker and Tees (1984)
• Looked at different age groups of infants (6-
8, 8-10, and 10-12 months), English-
speaking adults, and adult native speakers
of Nthlakapmx
• Tested to see if they could distinguish a
sound contrast in Nthlakapmx, a velar stop
and an uvular stop (/kʔi/ -/qʔi/)
Infant vs. adult speech perception
• Results same as those in the Hindi study:
• All the Nthlakapmx adults, only three out
of ten English-speaking adults, and 8 out
of 10 infants in the younger group
discriminated the contrast
• What about the older infants (10-12
months)?
Infant speech perception
• Infants seem to be sensitive to frequencies
and can “keep track” of how often certain
sounds occur (probabilistic learning)
• There is a decline in perceptual abilities
not because of a loss of ability, but rather
because the infants have shifted their
attention to those sound contrasts which
occur more frequently in the language
spoken around them
Conclusions
• Infants younger than 10 months have the
ability to make contrasts between
phonemes of any of the world’s languages
• However, with exposure to the native
language they retain only those that are
meaningful in the language they are being
exposed to
Conclusions
• Is there an innate speech perception
ability?
– Yes, but it does not appear to be species-
specific
– It also works in tandem with other perception
abilities (i.e., vision)
