Adult speech perception is characterized by perceptual integration which gives rise to trading relations: less evidence from one acoustic property can be offset by more evidence from another. This dissertation reports perceptual experiments with young children native in different dialects of English.

Identification results indicate that in perceiving final stop voicing, young children differ from adults in predominantly using either vowel duration or first formant offset frequency, rather than both. Which property children use appears to be a function of dialect background. Discrimination results suggest that integration may develop, at least for some contrasts, on the basis of learning patterns of covariation in the native language, with implications for theories of speech perception.

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