Today, we have Hiromasa Kotera to present the preliminary work of his PhD study, which is about the retainability and sustainability of phonetic discrimination ability of infants.
Rationale:
The perceptual attunement effect has been hotly discussed in linguistics and child development. It refers to a change in infants’ discrimination ability of language sounds. At first, infants can discriminate all sounds in human languages. However, being exposed much to their native language, infants start not to be able to tell certain sounds apart if they do not exist in their L1. Previous studies have shown that short-term exposure to certain languages with the target sounds can allow infants to regain the ability of phonetic discrimination. German does not have the vowel /æ/, and the sound /ɛ/ in German differs from English.
Research question:
This study is to see if the finding can be generalized for long-term effect by testing German infants’ phonetic discrimination ability of English vowels /æ/ and /ɛ/.
Preliminary research:
Three groups of infants aged 5-6 (n=40), 7-8 (30) and 12-13 (30) months are exposed to American English carrier words of the two test sounds: MAF /mæf/ and MEF /mɛf/. A visual habituation paradigm is employed involving three phases: habituation phase, test phase, and control phase. Infants’ looking time to a checkerboard is measured while listening to MAF or MEF.
Findings:
- For infants at 5-6 months old, there is a significant difference existing among conditions. In habituation, infants’ looking time when they heard MEF was longer than when they heard MAF.
- As for the other two groups of infants, no significant difference was detected among conditions. This supports the perceptual attunement effect.
Feedback from the group:
- It may be worthwhile to consider how well the test sounds recordings represent that category.
- It is also worth thinking about the difference between phonetic discrimination and perception.