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Title:
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Acoustic-Perceptual Salience and Developmental Speech Perception
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Author:
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Chandan Narayan
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cnarayan
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Michigan
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2006
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Phonetics
Language Acquisition
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Subject Language(s):
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Filipino
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Director(s):
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Patrice Beddor
Janet Werker
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Abstract:
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Inspired by the notion that some typologically less common contrasts may be
perceptually less salient than ubiquitous contrasts, this dissertation
investigates the perception, by infants and adults, of a relatively
uncommon nasal place contrast (onset /na-ŋa/) against a more common nasal
contrast (/ma-na/) in order to assess the role of acoustic-perceptual
salience in the development of speech perception. Do perceptually less
salient contrasts show a pattern of development different from the
well-known tendency for infants to successfully discriminate native and
non-native contrasts in young infancy? It is argued that phonetic
contrasts that are perceptually less salient than others may require
language experience to be discriminated in infancy.
An acoustic analysis (Experiment 1) of onset /m n ŋ/ in Filipino showed
that, in the perceptually relevant F2xF3 space, [na] was closer to [ŋa]
than to [ma]. When presented with these same stimuli in a discrimination
task (Experiment 2), English- and Filipino-speaking adults accurately
discriminated [ma]-[na], native to both language groups. The [na]-[ŋa]
contrast, native to Filipino but not English speakers, was discriminated at
chance level by the English listeners and was well discriminated by the
Filipino listeners, although slightly but significantly less accurately
than [ma]-[na]. When Filipino listeners were presented with the same
contrasts in two noisy listening conditions (Experiment 7), discrimination
of [na]-[ŋa] fell to near chance levels in the noisier condition (-5dB
SNR), while accuracy on [ma]-[na] remained above 90% in both noisy
conditions. These findings suggest that the [ma]-[na] contrast is
perceptually more salient than [na]-[ŋa] for adult listeners regardless of
language experience.
When English-hearing infants, aged 4-12 months, were presented with the two
Filipino contrasts (Experiments 3-5), they successfully discriminated the
[ma]-[na] contrast but not [na]-[ŋa]. In Experiment 6, Filipino-hearing
infants successfully discriminated native [na]-[ŋa] at 10-12 months, but
not at 6-8 months. Taken together, the results suggest that
acoustic-perceptual salience affects the discrimination of nasal place
contrasts in infancy, with the less salient [na]-[ŋa] contrast being more
difficult to discriminate in infancy than more salient [ma]-[na]. Native
language experience is required for the infant to perceptually segregate
acoustically similar categories.
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