Swoboda P J, Morse P A, Leavitt L A
Child Dev. 1976 Jun;47(2):459-65.
The present study investigated vowel discrimination in 2-week-old infants using a nonnutritive, high-amplitude sucking measure in a habituation-dishabituation paradigm. Infants were presented with pairs of vowel stimuli differing in equal logarithmic steps along the /i/ to /I/ continuum. Stimulus pairs of equal acoustic differences were selected to be either within or between the adult phonetic categories. Infants were divided into 3 experimental stimulus shift conditions: within category, between category, and control. Using a scoring system to asses perinatal events, half the infants in each condition were categorized as being at "higher risk" for developmental (p less than .05) were found between the control and both the within and between phonetic category conditions. No effects due to risk score population differences proved to be significant. These results indicate that 8-week-old infants discriminate the vowels /i/ and /I/ in a continuous as opposed to a categorical manner. Some differences were noted in response patterns between high- and low-risk score infants.
本研究在习惯化-去习惯化范式中，使用非营养性高幅度吸吮测量法，对2周龄婴儿的元音辨别能力进行了调查。向婴儿呈现沿/i/到/I/连续体以相等对数步长变化的元音刺激对。选择具有相等声学差异的刺激对，使其要么在成人语音类别之内，要么在成人语音类别之间。婴儿被分为3种实验性刺激转移条件：类别内、类别间和对照组。使用评分系统评估围产期事件，每种条件下一半的婴儿被归类为发育“高风险”（p小于0.05），在对照组与语音类别内和类别间条件之间均发现了这种情况。由于风险评分人群差异导致的影响未被证明具有显著性。这些结果表明，8周龄婴儿以连续而非分类的方式辨别元音/i/和/I/。高风险评分婴儿和低风险评分婴儿的反应模式存在一些差异。
