The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2013 Apr;56(2):427-40. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2012/12-0075). Epub 2012 Sep 19.
Previous research has demonstrated that children weight the acoustic cues to many phonemic decisions differently than do adults and gradually shift those strategies as they gain language experience. However, that research has focused on spectral and duration cues rather than on amplitude cues. In the current study, the authors examined amplitude rise time (ART; an amplitude cue) and formant rise time (FRT; a spectral cue) in the /b/-/w/ manner contrast for adults and children, and related those speech decisions to outcomes of nonspeech discrimination tasks.
Twenty adults and 30 children (ages 4-5 years) labeled natural and synthetic speech stimuli manipulated to vary ARTs and FRTs, and discriminated nonspeech analogs that varied only by ART in an AX paradigm.
Three primary results were obtained. First, listeners in both age groups based speech labeling judgments on FRT, not on ART. Second, the fundamental frequency of the natural speech samples did not influence labeling judgments. Third, discrimination performance for the nonspeech stimuli did not predict how listeners would perform with the speech stimuli.
Even though both adults and children are sensitive to ART, it was not weighted in phonemic judgments by these typical listeners.
先前的研究表明，儿童在许多音位决策中对声学线索的重视程度与成人不同，并且随着语言经验的积累逐渐改变这些策略。然而，该研究主要集中在频谱和持续时间线索上，而不是在幅度线索上。在当前的研究中，作者研究了成人和儿童在 /b/-/w/发音对比中幅度上升时间（ART；幅度线索）和共振峰上升时间（FRT；频谱线索），并将这些语音决策与非语音辨别任务的结果相关联。
20 名成人和 30 名 4-5 岁的儿童对自然和合成语音刺激进行了标记，这些刺激的 ARTs 和 FRTs 可以变化，并在 AX 范式中对仅通过 ART 变化的非语音类似物进行了辨别。
得到了三个主要结果。首先，两个年龄组的听众都基于 FRT 而不是 ART 做出语音标记判断。其次，自然语音样本的基频并不影响标记判断。第三，非语音刺激的辨别性能并不能预测听众在语音刺激下的表现。
尽管成人和儿童都对 ART 敏感，但这些典型听众在音位判断中并未加权处理 ART。
