Six- and ten-month-old infants' perception of non-contrastive variation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent evidence suggests that infants do not perceive all existing speech sounds from birth. For example, the velar and alveolar nasal place contrasts are so subtle that infants require experience to perceive it (e.g., Narayan et al., 2012). Here, we examine English-learning infants' perception of another subtle contrast: pre-voicing on stop consonants. Six- and ten- month-olds' ability to discriminate between voiced and voiceless stops (phonemically contrastive in English) as well as voiced and pre-voiced stops (allophonic in English, but contrastive in other languages such as Dutch) was tested using a variant of the Stimulus Alternation Paradigm (SAPP). Six-month-olds (N=34) distinguished between voiced and voiceless stops (p < .05), but not between voiced and pre-voiced stops. Ten-month-olds (N=32) failed to discriminate either contrast. We conclude that 1) English pre-voicing may be a subtle contrast requiring experience to perceive, and 2) this version of the SAPP might not be an ideal methodology to examine discrimination abilities in 10-month-olds. Overall, our findings thus far fit well with the notion that some contrasts require experience to perceive, as well as with past studies reporting mixed results regarding English-learning infants' ability to perceive pre-voicing contrasts (e.g. Aslin et al., 1981; Lasky et al., 1975).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".