title: Fine-grained variation in caregivers' /s/ predicts their infants' /s/ category.
abstract: Within the debate on the mechanisms underlying infants' perceptual acquisition, one hypothesis proposes that infants' perception is directly affected by the acoustic implementation of sound categories in the speech they hear. In consonance with this view, the present study shows that individual variation in fine-grained, subphonemic aspects of the acoustic realization of /s/ in caregivers' speech predicts infants' discrimination of this sound from the highly similar /∫/, suggesting that learning based on acoustic cue distributions may indeed drive natural phonological acquisition.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Département d'Etudes Cognitives-Ecole Normale Supérieure, Centre National de la Recherche Scientique, Paris 75005, France. alecristia@gmail.com
authors.forename: Alejandrina
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cristià
mesh_terms: D017028:Caregivers; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010700:Phonetics; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D002666:Psychology, Child