Beschreibung:
<jats:p>One way that speakers distinguish between phonemic categories is through voicing, frequently measured using voice onset time (VOT). Much perceptual research on voicing identification and discrimination has used synthetic speech stimuli varying in VOT. Results from adult listeners typically show stable crossover regions in the 20–35 ms range. Subsequent work, however, reveals that listeners' VOT boundaries vary with speech rate; further, an extensive history of research into vowel perception indicates that listeners normalize across vocal tract sizes. These considerations lead to the possibility that adult voicing boundaries may differ between the speech of adults vs. children, since children have slower speech rates and smaller vocal tracts. The present study obtained adult discrimination data for natural productions of bilabial and alveolar cognate pairs produced by 2–3-year-old monolingual, English-speaking children. Randomized stimuli were presented twice to 20 listeners resulting in 4,000 rated stimuli per category. The findings show 50% crossover points for VOT values at 28 ms for bilabials and 32 ms for alveolar phonemes. Such outcomes are consistent with past work based on adult data and suggest that mature listeners do not use substantially different perceptual criteria for judging voicing in children’s speech. Declaration of Interest Statement The authors have no financial or nonfinancial disclosures to report.</jats:p>