Learning to perceive speech: How fricative perception changes, and how it stays the same

A part of becoming a mature perceiver involves learning what signal properties provide relevant information about objects and events in the environment. Regarding speech perception, evidence supports the position that allocation of attention to various signal properties changes as children gain experience with their native language, and so learn what information is relevant to recognizing phonetic structure in that language. However, one weakness in that work has been that data have largely come from experiments that all use similarly designed stimuli and show similar age-related differences in labeling. In this study, two perception experiments were conducted that used stimuli designed differently from past experiments, with different predictions. In experiment 1, adults and children (4, 6, and 8 years of age) labeled stimuli with natural /f/ and /θ/ noises and synthetic vocalic portions that had initial formant transitions varying in appropriateness for /f/ or /θ/. The prediction was that similar labeling patterns would be found for all listeners. In experiment 2, adults and children labeled stimuli with initial /s/-like and /∫/-like noises and synthetic vocalic portions that had initial formant transitions varying in appropriateness for /s/ or /∫/. The prediction was that, as found before, children would weight formant transitions more and fricative noises less than adults, but that this age-related difference would elicit different patterns of labeling from those found previously. Results largely matched predictions, and so further evidence was garnered for the position that children learn which properties of the speech signal provide relevant information about phonetic structure in their native language.