Speech Perception in Infants

@article{Eimas1971SpeechPI,
  title={Speech Perception in Infants},
  author={Peter D. Eimas and Einar R. Siqueland and Peter W. Jusczyk and James M. Vigorito},
  journal={Science},
  year={1971},
  volume={171},
  pages={303 - 306}
}
Discriminiationi of synthetic speech sounds was studied in 1- and 4-month-old infants. The speech sounds varied along an acoustic dimension previously shown to cue phonemic distinctions among the voiced and voiceless stop consonants in adults. Discriminability was measured by an increase in conditioned response rate to a second speech sound after habituation to the first speech sound. Recovery from habituation was greater for a given acoustic difference when the two stimuli were from different… 
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1,835 Citations

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Two- and 3-month-old infants were found to discriminate the acoustic cues for the phonetic feature of place of articulation in a categorical manner; that is, evidence for the discriminability of two…

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Evidence of developmental changes in speech processing were noted for the first time with infants in this age range, and there was a tendency from global toward more specific representations on the part of the older infants.

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Monkeys were presented with synthetic speech stimuli in a shock-avoidance situation. On the basis of their behavior, perceptual boundaries were determined along the physical continua between /ba/ and…
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for generously making available the facilities of the Haskins Laboratories. We also thank