Tsuji, S. 1, 2 & Cristia, A. 3
1 Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
2 International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences
3 CNRS LSCP
The development of native language phoneme perception is a central focus in research on language development. Yet, no recent source provides a comprehensive overview over decades of data, let alone by organizing them in a qualitative and/or quantitative way. InPhonDB aims to provide such an overview, starting with infant vowel discrimination. Infant vowel perception is particularly interesting to focus on because vowels vary along dimensions that are easily parametrized. Moreover, it can shed light on two key theoretical questions: infants' innate perceptual abilities (e.g., Polka & Bohn, 2011) and their subsequent experience-modulated development (e.g., Kuhl et al., 2008). Therefore, we qualitatively reviewed xx studies on infant vowel discrimination including results from behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging methods applied to infants 0-12 months of age. Of these, 35 (124 unique experiments) provided sufficient information to be included in a subsequent quantitative meta-analysis. The quantitative data provide statistical support for early perceptual asymmetries in vowel discrimination (cf. Polka & Bohn, 2011) and a role of acoustic distance between vowels (cf. Sebastian-Galles & Bosch, 2009), but reveal little evidence for perceptual attunement based on language exposure (cf. Kuhl et al., 1992). We discuss these new findings in light of recent evidence suggesting that there might be differences between vowel and consonant perception (e.g., Pons, Sabourin, Cady, & Werker, 2006), a possibility not reflected in most current models of infant phoneme perception. Thus, the free, public repository InPhonDB already provides a unique overview of the main factors structuring infant vowel discrimination. Furthermore, it points to important limitations in current available data. Finally, this online resource can accommodate extensions of the vowel discrimination database as new results come to light, as well as the addition of other topics of infant perception. Thus, it allows the research community to better keep up with infants' phonological development.