Norris et al. (2002)
Introduction
-Infants ~6 months of age can still discriminate phonetic contrasts in non-native languages; lose this skill by 10 months of age in favor of better discrimination of native language phonetic contrasts; this is important for minimal pair discrimination; phonetic categorical modulation seems to occur based on lexical information, perhaps accounting for regional dialect/pronunciation changes
-Does lexical information feed back to pre-lexical selection of phonemes? This study tests this theory. Feedback systems for learning distinct from "on-line" feedback systems.
Experiment 1
-Speakers presented with recordings of fluent Dutch speaker for training, 3 groups of subjects. Group 1 heard 20 words ending with ambiguous /f/-/s/ spectrum sounds followed by 20 words with unambiguous /s/ sounds. Group 2 heard 20 words ending with ambiguous /f/-/s/ spectrum sounds followed by 20 words with unambiguous /f/ sounds. 3rd group was control, heard ambiguous /f/-/s/ continuum endings for all words. Groups were given a lexical decision and phoneme categorization task on 3 lists of words similar to the training words, with some filler. Results