title: Formant onsets and formant transitions as developmental cues to vowel perception.
abstract: The purpose of this study was to determine whether children give more perceptual weight than do adults to dynamic spectral cues versus static cues. Listeners were 10 children between the ages of 3;8 and 4;1 (mean 3;11) and ten adults between the ages of 23;10 and 32;0 (mean 25;11). Three experimental stimulus conditions were presented, with each containing stimuli of 30 ms duration. The first experimental condition consisted of unchanging formant onset frequencies ranging in value from frequencies for [i] to those for [a], appropriate for a bilabial stop consonant context. The second two experimental conditions consisted of either an [i] or [a] onset frequency with a 25 ms portion of a formant transition whose trajectory was toward one of a series of target frequencies ranging from those for [i] to those for [a]. Results indicated that the children attended differently than the adults on both the [a] and [i] formant onset frequency cue to identify the vowels. The adults gave more equal weight to the [i]-onset and [a]-onset dynamic cues as reflected in category boundaries than the children did. For the [i]-onset condition, children were not as confident compared to adults in vowel perception, as reflected in slope analyses.
authors: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center for Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, 1215 21st Avenue South, Room 8310, Nashville, Tennessee 37232-8242, USA. ralph.n.ohde@vanderbilt.edu
authors: Ralph N
authors: RN
authors: Ohde
authors: Sarah R
authors: SR
authors: German
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000375:Aging; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult