Additional Studies

We found that 9-month-olds know the difference between two speech sounds - but not always. 

• We have finished up with our study, and we're preparing to show what we found. 

From birth, infants can detect the differences between most of the world's speech sounds. That is, if you are a speaker of a language, you have an inventory of speech sounds.  For example, speakers of English use speech sounds to make words. If you look at the bolded consonants here: 'kind', 'mind', 'find', 'rind', 'thin', you will find that these sounds are parts of English, but speech sounds like 'r' and 'th' are rare in the languages of the world (in linguistics, /ɹ/ is the symbol for the 'r' sound and /θ/ is the symbol for the 'th' sound).

Moreover, we combine speech sounds in particular ways. For example, we can say 'blue' in English. We can also say 'glue', or 'Pluto'. As English speakers, we cannot say 'dlue', 'dluto', or 'tlue', but we can say 'true'. However, the speech sounds /dl/ or /tl/ can be spoken by Polish, Czech, Nahuatl, and Hebrew.

So, how do we learn this in infancy? Many researchers have found that, over time and depending on the category of speech sounds (vowels, consonants), infants start to focus on their native language while they lose speech sounds that they don't use.

Our study tested French and English 9-month-olds. The stimuli (/bla/, /gla/, /dla/) was presented to the infants from a female speaker of English through a speaker. It turned out that the French and English infants showed no difference between the languages. 

What we did find, though, is that infants were able to hear the difference between /bla/ and /dla/. However, that wasn't the case for /gla/ and /dla/. We are still working on why there is a difference between /gla/ and /dla/.

At this point, we are looking to see where these results will lead us next. 

If you are interested or have questions, please email us at magpies@ualberta.ca or you can sign up for the ChIRP list, and we will contact you when there is a study available.