Discriminability and Perceptual Weighting of Some Acoustic Cues to Speech Perception by 3-Year-Olds

Studies of children’s speech perception have shown that young children process speech signals differently than adults. Specifically, the relative contributions made by various acoustic parameters to some linguistic decisions seem to differ for children and adults. Such findings have led to the hypothesis that there is a developmental shift in the perceptual weighting of acoustic parameters that results from experience with a native language (i.e., the Developmental Weighting Shift). This developmental shift eventually leads the child to adopt the optimal perceptual weighting strategy for the native language being learned (i.e., one that allows the listener to make accurate decisions about the phonemic structure of his or her native language). Although this proposal has intuitive appeal, there is at least one serious challenge that can be leveled against it: Perhaps age-related differences inspeech perception can more appropriately be explained by age-related differences in basic auditory-processing abilities. That is, perhaps children are not as sensitive as adults to subtle differences in acoustic structure and so make linguistic decisions based on the acoustic information that is most perceptually salient. The present study tested this hypothesis for the acoustic cues relevant to fricative identity in fricative-vowel syllables. Results indicated that 3-year-olds were not as sensitive to changes in these acoustic cues as adults are, but that these age-related differences in auditory sensitivity could not entirely account for age-related differences in perceptual weighting strategies.