The role of acoustic/perceptual salience in directional asymmetry in infant stop/fricative contrast perception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The presence of stops in a language implicates the presence of fricatives but the reverse is unattested. Similarly, infants' producing fricatives implies that they acquired stops. The privileged status of stops influences infants' stop/fricative perception. For example, Altvater-Mackensen and Fikkert (2010) reported that Dutch-learning 14-month-olds noticed a fricative to stop change but not vice versa. These findings were interpreted in terms of phonological specifications while dismissing acoustic/perceptual factors. In this study, we assessed whether pre-linguistic infants show perceptual asymmetry. We tested English and French 4-5-month-olds using the look-while-listen procedure in which they were presented native nonsense syllables - /bas/ and /vas/. A mixed ANOVA showed a significant interaction between trial type and group (p=.027). Infants in /vas/-habituated group noticed the switch when the habituated fricative changed to a stop but infants in /bas/-habituated group did not notice the switch when the habituated stop changed to a fricative. This perceptual asymmetry in infants before babbling and word recognition stage indicates the potential role of acoustic/perceptual factors. We suggest that the above-mentioned privileged status of stops may reflect the possibility that stops are acoustically/perceptually more salient than fricatives. This salience difference is predicted to induce directional asymmetry in stop/fricative contrast perception.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".