LINGUIST List 11.1987

Wed Sep 20 2000

Qs: Categorical Sound Discrimination, "End-focus"

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Sean P McGrew, infant categorical sound discrimination
2. Denis Jamet, end-focus

Our undergraduate language acquisition class 
is looking for a solution to a seeming contradiction, 
and our prof siezed the opportunity to introduce us 
to the question-answering power of this 
huge community of linguists, assigning me the job 
of posting the question. 

Our textbook is the fourth edition (1997) of Jean Berko 
Gleason. In pages 82-83, citing a 1971 study 
by Eimas et al., Gleason says that one-month old infants 
show a categorical discrimination between /b/ and /p/,
 i.e. they distinguish the sounds based on different 
voice onset time, but they "ignored similar-sized timing 
differences involving different tokens within 
the categories of /b/ or /p/." 

He goes on to say that
infants less than three months old are able to discriminate 
between similar-sounding segments from any language, 
giving as examples studies by Trehub (1976) and 
Werker and Tees (1984). 

Here's our problem: given that languages vary 
considerably in voicing onset, it seems that if 
one-month old infants are already classing sounds 
into mother-tongue phonemes, they shouldn't 
exhibit the ability to discriminate differences 
that are non-meaningful in their mother tongue. 
For example, wouldn't an English-hearing infant 
which correctly grouped all english /b/ and /p/ 
necessarily mis-class some French or Spanish 
or Korean /p/ sounds? 

Or is there some categorization that is really
universal? 

Thanks for any insight or help.

Sean McGrew
University of NC, Chapel Hill

Dear linguists,

A colleague of mine is wondering about the origin of the term
"end-focus"; who coined it for the first time (Halliday???), where?
Any suggestion will be greatly appreaciated.

Denis Jamet
Universit� Jean Moulin - Lyon 3
FRANCE