An electrophysiological study of infants' sensitivity to the sound patterns of English speech

Author(s): Shucard, D. W., Shucard, J. L., Gerken, L. A.

Journal/Book: J Speech Lang Hear Res. 1998; 41: 10801 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD 20852-3279. Amer Speech-Language-Hearing Assoc. 874-886.

Abstract: The study explores 10- to 11-month-old infants' sensitivity to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained for tones that were superimposed on two versions of a story: an Unmodified version containing normal English Function morphemes, and a Modified version in which the prosodic and segmental properties of a subset of function morphemes were changed to make them atypical. The 11-month-olds exhibited significantly lower amplitude ERPs to the tones during the Modified story than to the Unmodified story, whereas the 10-month-olds showed no differences. These results suggest that the 11-month-olds discriminated the two versions of the story based on their representations of the phonological properties of English. Further, the tone-probe ERP method can successfully be used to study the development of speech perception in the pre-linguistic infant.

Note: Article Shafer VL, Hofstra Univ, Dept Speech Language Hearing Sci, 106 Davidson Hall, Hempstead,NY 11550 USA

Keyword(s): language development; event-related potentials (ERPs); prosody; infants; AUDITORY EVOKED-POTENTIALS; YOUNG INFANTS; LANGUAGE-ACQUISITION; PERCEPTION; PREFERENCE; PROSODY; UNITS; WORDS

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