Study finds how babies learn contrastive linguistics

Washington: Infants can distinguish most sounds soon after birth, and by age one, they start to become language-specific listeners. However, researchers are still trying to figure out how babies recognise which acoustic dimensions of their language are contrastive, a linguistic term that describes differences between speech sounds that can change the meanings of words. In English, for example, [b] and [d] are contrastive because changing the [b] in ‘ball’ to a [d] creates a different word, ‘doll.’ The findings were published in a recent paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by two computational linguists affiliated with the University of Maryland offers new insight on this topic, which is imperative for a better understanding of how infants learn what the sounds of their native language are.
Their research shows that an infant’s ability to interpret acoustic differences as either contrastive or non-contrastive may come from the contexts that different sounds occur in.
For a long time, researchers believed that there would be obvious differences between the way that contrastive sounds, such as short and long vowels in Japanese, are pronounced. However, although the pronunciations of these two sounds are different in careful speech, the acoustics are often much more ambiguous in more natural settings.
“This is one of the first phonetic learning accounts that has been shown to work on spontaneous data, suggesting that infants could be learning which acoustic dimensions are contrastive after all,” says Kasia Hitczenko, lead author of the paper.
Also Read Study: Having lot of tea may lower risk of getting type 2 diabetes Hitczenko graduated from the University of Maryland in 2019 with a doctorate in linguistics. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics Laboratory at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.