Beschreibung:
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<jats:title>Purpose</jats:title>
<jats:p>This study assessed the role of spectro-temporal modulation cues in the discrimination of 2 phonetic contrasts (voicing and place) for young infants.</jats:p>
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<jats:title>Method</jats:title>
<jats:p>A visual-habituation procedure was used to assess the ability of French-learning 6-month-old infants with normal hearing to discriminate voiced versus unvoiced (/aba/-/apa/) and labial versus dental (/aba/-/ada/) stop consonants. The stimuli were processed by tone-excited vocoders to degrade frequency-modulation cues while preserving: (a) amplitude-modulation (AM) cues within 32 analysis frequency bands, (b) slow AM cues only (<16 Hz) within 32 bands, and (c) AM cues within 8 bands.</jats:p>
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<jats:title>Results</jats:title>
<jats:p>Infants exhibited discrimination responses for both phonetic contrasts in each processing condition. However, when fast AM cues were degraded, infants required a longer exposure to vocoded stimuli to reach the habituation criterion.</jats:p>
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<jats:title>Conclusions</jats:title>
<jats:p>Altogether, these results indicate that the processing of modulation cues conveying phonetic information on voicing and place is “functional” at 6 months. The data also suggest that the perceptual weight of fast AM speech cues may change during development.</jats:p>
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