Peter Varghese, Kalashnikova Marina, Burnham Denis
MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, New South Wales, Australia.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2018 May 17;61(5):1322-1333. doi: 10.1044/2018_JSLHR-H-17-0334.
An important skill in the development of speech perception is to apply optimal weights to acoustic cues so that phonemic information is recovered from speech with minimum effort. Here, we investigated the development of acoustic cue weighting of amplitude rise time (ART) and formant rise time (FRT) cues in children as measured by mismatch negativity (MMN).
Twelve adults and 36 children aged 6-12 years listened to a /ba/-/wa/ contrast in an oddball paradigm in which the standard stimulus had the ART and FRT cues of /ba/. In different blocks, the deviant stimulus had either the ART or FRT cues of /wa/.
The results revealed that children younger than 10 years were sensitive to both ART and FRT cues whereas 10- to 12-year-old children and adults were sensitive only to FRT cues. Moreover, children younger than 10 years generated a positive mismatch response, whereas older children and adults generated MMN.
These results suggest that preattentive adultlike weighting of ART and FRT cues is attained only by 10 years of age and accompanies the change from mismatch response to the more mature MMN response.
言语感知发展中的一项重要技能是对声学线索应用最佳权重，以便用最小的努力从语音中恢复音素信息。在此，我们通过失配负波（MMN）研究了儿童对振幅上升时间（ART）和共振峰上升时间（FRT）线索的声学线索权重的发展。
12名成年人和36名6至12岁的儿童在一个oddball范式中听/ba/-/wa/对比，其中标准刺激具有/ba/的ART和FRT线索。在不同的组块中，偏差刺激具有/wa/的ART或FRT线索。
结果显示，10岁以下的儿童对ART和FRT线索都敏感，而10至12岁的儿童和成年人仅对FRT线索敏感。此外，10岁以下的儿童产生了正失配反应，而年龄较大的儿童和成年人产生了MMN。
这些结果表明，只有到10岁时才能实现对ART和FRT线索的类似成人的前注意权重，并且这伴随着从不匹配反应到更成熟的MMN反应的变化。
