Infant Discrimination of a Morphologically Relevant Word‐Final Contrast |
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Authors: | Laurel Fais Sachiyo Kajikawa Shigeaki Amano Janet F Werker |
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Institution: | 1. University of British Columbia, Canada;2. NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation Seika‐cho, Japan |
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Abstract: | Six‐, 12‐, and 18‐month‐old English‐hearing infants were tested on their ability to discriminate nonword forms ending in the final stop consonants /k/ and /t/ from their counterparts with final /s/ added, resulting in final clusters /ks/ and /ts/, in a habituation–dishabituation, looking time paradigm. Infants at all 3 ages demonstrated an ability to discriminate this type of contrast, a contrast that constitutes one phonetic cue for the English morphological concepts of plural, possession, and person. These results suggest that across a significant portion of the development of infants' speech perception, this type of final contrast is discriminable. |
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