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Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants' phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evidence for this pattern comes primarily from learners from a limited number of regions and languages. Very little evidence has accumulated on infants learning languages spoken in Asia, which accounts for most of the world's population. The present study examined the developmental trajectory of Korean‐learning infants' sensitivity to a native stop contrast during the first year of life. The Korean language utilizes unusual voiceless three‐way stop categories, requiring target categories to be derived from tight phonetic space. Further, two of these categories—lenis and aspirated—have undergone a diachronic change in recent decades as the primary acoustic cue for distinction has shifted among modern speakers. Consequently, the input distributions of these categories are mixed across speakers and speech styles, requiring learners to build flexible representations of target categories along these variations. The results showed that among the three age groups—4–6 months, 7–9 months, and 10–12 months—we tested, only 10–12‐month‐olds showed weak sensitivity to the two categories, suggesting that robust discrimination is not in place by the end of the first year. The study adds scarcely represented data, lending additional support for the lack of early sensitivity and prolonged emergence of native phonology that are inconsistent with learners of predominant studies and calls for more diverse samples to verify the generality of the typical perceptual narrowing pattern. Research Highlights: We investigated Korean‐learning infants' developmental trajectory of native phoneme categories and whether they show the typical perceptual narrowing pattern.Robust discrimination did not appear until 12 months, suggesting that Korean infants' native phonology is not stabilized by the end of the first year.The prolonged emergence of sensitivity could be due to restricted phonetic space and input variations but suggests the possibility of a different developmental trajectory.The current study contributes scarcely represented Korean‐learning infants' phonetic discrimination data to the speech development field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we report data on the development of Korean infants’ perception of a rare fricative phoneme distinction. Korean fricative consonants have received much interest in the linguistic community due to the language’s distinct categorization of sounds. Unlike many fricative contrasts utilized in most of the world’s languages, Korean fricatives (/s*/-/s/) are all voiceless. Moreover, compared with other sound categories, fricatives have received very little attention in the speech perception development field and no studies thus far have examined Korean infants’ development of native phonology in this domain. Using a visual habituation paradigm, we tested 4‒6-month-old and 7‒9-month-old Korean infants on their abilities to discriminate the Korean fricative pair in the [a] vowel context, /s*a/-/sa/, which can be distinguished based on acoustic cues, such as the durations of aspiration and frication noise. Korean infants older than 7 months were able to reliably discriminate the fricative pair but younger infants did not show clear signs of such discrimination. These results add to the growing evidence that there are native sound contrasts infants cannot discriminate early on without a certain amount of language exposure, providing further data to help delineate the specific nature of early perceptual capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Korean fit distinction has been at the center of a debate about whether language can influence spatial concepts. Most research on this issue has largely assumed that the concepts that support Korean fit terms are signaled by innate abstract visual cues (e.g., relative motion of objects), while linguistic studies in Korean suggest that fit terms are object-specific. To examine this issue, Korean-speaking three- to six year-old children and adults were asked to describe spatial scenes, which varied in object type/relations and visual cues for fit. Both groups relied on the prototypical relation between pairs of objects (e.g., rings tend to fit tightly on fingers) in selecting tight-fit terms, and this dependence increased with age. In contrast to Whorfian and Conceptual tuning accounts (Bowerman & Choi, 2003; Hespos & Spelke, 2004), these results suggest that Korean fit concepts are not entirely innate or abstract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]