Polka, L. 1, 2 & Nam, Y. 1, 2
1 School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, McGill University
2 Centre for Research on Brain, Language & Music
In a recent study, infants displayed a robust phonetic bias when perceiving a phonemic consonant contrast (Nam & Polka, 2016). Both English and French infants (4-5 months) preferred to listen to /bas/ over /vas/ syllables in a listening preference task. This same bias emerged in a habituation-based discrimination task; both groups showed a novelty preference (favoring /bas/) following habituation to /vas/ but no preference following habituation to /bas/. This bias appears to be unrelated to language experience given that /b/ occurs more frequently than /v/ in English whereas the reverse pattern is found in French. In the present study we examine how language experience impacts this bias by testing older infants (10-12 months) using the same stimuli and habitation-based discrimination task. Older French infants displayed a /vas/ preference regardless of whether they were habituated to /bas/ or /vas/. Preliminary results with older English infants point to a novelty preference in both habituation conditions, suggesting that the earlier /b/ bias is gone. Overall, language experience appears to override the earlier /b/ bias in both groups but in different ways, suggesting that how infants tune into native phonetic units depends on the segment?s specific role in the ambient language system.