Werker J F, Tees R C
J Acoust Soc Am. 1984 Jun;75(6):1866-78. doi: 10.1121/1.390988.
Previous research has indicated that young infants can discriminate speech sounds across phonetic boundaries regardless of specific relevant experience, and that there is a modification in this ability during ontogeny such that adults often have difficulty discriminating phonetic contrasts which are not used contrastively in their native language. This pattern of findings has often been interpreted as suggesting that humans are endowed with innate auditory sensitivities which enable them to discriminate speech sounds according to universal phonetic boundaries and that there is a decline or loss in this ability after being exposed to a language which contrasts only a subset of those distinctions. The present experiments were designed to determine whether this modification represents a loss of sensorineural response capabilities or whether it shows a shift in attentional focus and/or processing strategies. In experiment 1, adult English-speaking subjects were tested on their ability to discriminate two non-English speech contrasts in a category-change discrimination task after first being predisposed to adopt one of four perceptual sets. In experiments 2, 3, and 4 subjects were tested in an AX (same/different) procedure, and the effects of both limited training and duration of the interstimulus interval were assessed. Results suggest that the previously observed ontogenetic modification in the perception of non-native phonetic contrasts involves a change in processing strategies rather than a sensorineural loss. Adult listeners can discriminate sounds across non-native phonetic categories in some testing conditions, but are not able to use that ability in testing conditions which have demands similar to those required in natural language processing.
先前的研究表明，年幼的婴儿能够跨越语音界限辨别语音，而无需特定的相关经验，并且在个体发育过程中这种能力会发生变化，以至于成年人常常难以辨别其母语中未形成对比性使用的语音对立。这种研究结果模式常常被解释为表明人类天生具有听觉敏感性，这使他们能够根据通用的语音界限辨别语音，并且在接触到仅区分其中一部分差异的语言后，这种能力会下降或丧失。本实验旨在确定这种变化是代表感觉神经反应能力的丧失，还是表明注意力焦点和/或处理策略的转变。在实验1中，成年说英语的受试者在首先倾向于采用四种感知集之一后，在类别变化辨别任务中测试他们辨别两种非英语语音对立的能力。在实验2、3和4中，受试者采用AX（相同/不同）程序进行测试，并评估有限训练和刺激间隔持续时间的影响。结果表明，先前观察到的在非母语语音对立感知中的个体发育变化涉及处理策略的改变，而不是感觉神经丧失。成年听众在某些测试条件下能够辨别跨非母语语音类别的声音，但在与自然语言处理所需要求类似的测试条件下无法运用该能力。
