An electrophysiological study of infants' sensitivity to the sound patterns of English speech

The study explores 10- to 11-month-old infants' sensitivity to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained for tones that were superimposed on two versions of a story: an Unmodified version containing normal English function morphemes, and a Modified version in which the prosodic and segmental properties of a subset of function morphemes were changed to make them atypical. The 11-month-olds exhibited significantly lower amplitude ERPs to the tones during the Modified story than to the Unmodified story, whereas the 10-month-olds showed no differences. These results suggest that the 11- month-olds discriminated the two versions of the story based on their representations of the phonological properties of English. Further, the tone- probe ERP method can successfully be used to study the development of speech perception in the pre-linguistic infant.