Miller C L, Morse P A
J Speech Hear Res. 1976 Sep;19(3):578-89. doi: 10.1044/jshr.1903.578.
Categorical discrimination of place of articulation in the stimuli [dae] and [gae] was investigated in three- to four-month-old infants using a 20/20 cardiac orienting response paradigm. In this procedure infants were presented with 20 tokens of one syllable followed immediately by 20 tokens of a change stimulus. Each infant received a between-category shift, a within-category shift, and a no-shift control condition, with the order of conditions completely counterbalanced across subjects. Discrimination was indexed by an orienting response to the onset of the second 20 stimuli. The data were analyzed for evidence of categorical discrimination both within subjects (each condition pooled across orders of presentation) and between subjects, as is typical of infant-categorical discrimination studies. Both sets of results revealed that infants discriminate the cues for place of articulation categorically. These findings demonstrate the generality of the infant categorical discrimination observed with the nonnutritive operant sucking paradigm and indicate the usefulness of the heart rate paradigm employed in the present study for the collection of within-subject speech discrimination data across a wide-range of subject populations.
利用20/20心脏定向反应范式，对三到四个月大的婴儿在刺激音[dae]和[gae]中发音部位的范畴性辨别进行了研究。在这个程序中，先向婴儿呈现20个某一个音节的 tokens，紧接着呈现20个变化刺激的 tokens。每个婴儿都接受了类别间转换、类别内转换和无转换控制条件，条件的顺序在所有受试者中完全平衡。辨别通过对第二个20个刺激开始时的定向反应来衡量。像婴儿范畴性辨别研究通常那样，对数据进行了受试者内（每个条件下所有呈现顺序合并）和受试者间的范畴性辨别证据分析。两组结果都表明婴儿能对发音部位的线索进行范畴性辨别。这些发现证明了在非营养性操作性吮吸范式中观察到的婴儿范畴性辨别的普遍性，并表明本研究中采用的心率范式对于在广泛的受试者群体中收集受试者内言语辨别数据的有用性。
