Infant Phonemic Discrimination DataBase Home

Even before birth, infants are listening to us. In a world full of sounds, they must learn to attend to certain sound contrasts more than others in order to parse speech effectively. What are infants' patterns of perception and discrimination at each step of this trip? On this website, we nucleate meta-analyses bearing on this key question. We now hold the largest database of infant vowel discrimination research, in a public format.

What can InPhonDB do for you?

Imagine knowing the inner works of 100 studies without actually having to run them -- well, that is kind of what InPhonDB can do for you! 

Check out this tutorial page whether you are planning, or have already carried out, a discrimination study -- or even if you are working on something that is sort of related but not quite on discrimination.

Visualizer

Visualize the relationship between effect sizes and various study variables here.

How much data are we missing?

We would like to know how much data we are missing by including only published/openly reported studies. 

If you have been the principal investigator in least one experiment on infant speech sound discrimination in the last five years (published or unpublished), please consider filling in our 5-minute e-survey. (If all your studies are or will be published, you will answer "no" to the first question).

Special reports

In the process of putting together the vowel discrimination database, we also explored this literature in a number of ways. Read up on: 



Use the Vowel Discrimination database

The database can be viewed on google spreadsheets. You can then click on the menu File/Download and choose the format that you prefer. 
You can also download a version which already contains the effect sizes generated using this R script.

Previous versions:

Help InPhonDB grow!

There are many ways you can help this venture. Find out more here.


Read about work using this results repository

If you use the database, please mention this site including a link. And when you write up or present something, or if you have a neat tool to mine the repository, please email us at infant.sound.discrimination@gmail.com so we can advertise your work too!

The following work is based on the results repository.
  • Tsuji, S., Bergmann, C. & Cristia, A. (2014). Community-augmented meta-analyses. Perspectives on Psychological Sciences, 9(6), 661-665.
  • Tsuji, S. & Cristia, A. (2014). Perceptual attunement in vowels: A meta-analysis. Developmental Psychobiology, 56, 179-191.
  • Tsuji, S., & Cristia, A. (2013). 50 years of infant vowel discrimination research: what have we learned? Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, 17(3), 1-11.