Publication Date:
1997-08-01
Description:
In the early months of life, infants acquire information about the phonetic properties of their native language simply by listening to adults speak. The acoustic properties of phonetic units in language input to young infants in the United States, Russia, and Sweden were examined. In all three countries, mothers addressing their infants produced acoustically more extreme vowels than they did when addressing adults, resulting in a "stretching" of vowel space. The findings show that language input to infants provides exceptionally well-specified information about the linguistic units that form the building blocks for words.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Kuhl, P K -- Andruski, J E -- Chistovich, I A -- Chistovich, L A -- Kozhevnikova, E V -- Ryskina, V L -- Stolyarova, E I -- Sundberg, U -- Lacerda, F -- DC 00520/DC/NIDCD NIH HHS/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1997 Aug 1;277(5326):684-6.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Box 357920, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9235890" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Adult
;
Female
;
Humans
;
Infant
;
*Language Development
;
Mothers
;
*Phonetics
;
Russia
;
Speech Acoustics
;
*Speech Perception
;
Sweden
;
United States
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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