Cognitive influences in infant speech perception

Speech perception during the first year reflects increasing attunement to native language phonetic features, but the mechanisms underlying this development are not well understood. Reductions in non‐native phonetic discrimination have been linked to improvement in native phonetic discrimination and later vocabulary growth (Kuhl et al., 2005), and performance on nonlinguistic tasks (Lalonde and Werker, 1995). The present study examined links between native and non‐native voice onset time discrimination, receptive vocabulary (MacArthur‐Bates CDI), and cognitive control abilities at 11 months. Infants (n=18) completed a double‐target conditioned head turn task and two nonlinguistic tasks requiring attentional control and resistance to irrelevant cues (means‐end and detour‐reaching object retrieval). Infants with CDI scores above the median showed higher native discrimination scores, t(16)=2.15 0.05, but no group differences for the nonnative contrast. Infants with scores above the median on either cognitive task showed worse discrimination of the nonnative contrast (means‐end, t(15)=2.27p0.04; detour‐reaching, t(15)=3.49, p.01), but no group differences for the native contrast. These results suggest that cognitive control plays a role in infants’ ability to ignore acoustic cues that are irrelevant to their native languages phonemic categories. [Work supported by NICHD (Grant HD37954) and a UW NSF Science of Learning Center Grant (LIFE).]