title: Who's talking now? Infants' perception of vowels with infant vocal properties.
abstract: Little is known about infants' abilities to perceive and categorize their own speech sounds or vocalizations produced by other infants. In the present study, prebabbling infants were habituated to /i/ ("ee") or /a/ ("ah") vowels synthesized to simulate men, women, and children, and then were presented with new instances of the habituation vowel and a contrasting vowel on different trials, with all vowels simulating infant talkers. Infants showed greater recovery of interest to the contrasting vowel than to the habituation vowel, which demonstrates recognition of the habituation-vowel category when it was produced by an infant. A second experiment showed that encoding the vowel category and detecting the novel vowel required additional processing when infant vowels were included in the habituation set. Despite these added cognitive demands, infants demonstrated the ability to track vowel categories in a multitalker array that included infant talkers. These findings raise the possibility that young infants can categorize their own vocalizations, which has important implications for early vocal learning.
authors.affiliation: School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, McGill University linda.polka@mcgill.ca.
authors.forename: Linda
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Polka
authors.affiliation: School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, McGill University.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Masapollo
authors.affiliation: Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, McGill University Département de Linguistique, Université du Québec à Montréal.
authors.forename: Lucie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ménard
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception
keywords: babbling; infancy; speech perception; talker variability; vowel categorization