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TREHUB, SANDRA E. The Discrimination of Foreign Speech Contrasts by Infants and Adults. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 466-472. Infants 5-17 weeks of age were presented with foreign speech sounds which were contingent upon their nonutritive sucking. When the infants met a specified criterion of sucking decrement, a contrasting sound was substituted. Significant differences in response recovery for experimental versus control (no sound change) subjects were found for the contrast pairs pa-p-a and za-ia. Adults were presented with a comparable discrimination task for the foreign contrasts za-ia and the English contrasts li-ri. It was found that adults achieved perfect accuracy with English contrasts but readily confused the foreign contrasts. The implications of these results for theories of perceptual development are discussed.
Sandra E. Trehub (1976) studied this question.