The contrastive hierarchy in phonology 2009 Dresher.pdf - CUNY ...

While the contrastive hierarchy has been useful in depicting developing
inventories as they appear in children’s production, experiments on child and
infant perception of phonetic contrasts have appeared to support a different view
of phonological acquisition. Beginning with Eimas et al. (1971), it has been shown
that infants can discriminate fine phonetic distinctions in speech sounds,
including sounds that are not discriminated in the ambient language (Trehub
1976, Werker et al. 1981, Werker and Tees 1984). Thus, whereas adults have
difficulty discriminating certain distinctions not used in their native language,
infant perception appears to be ‘universal’. 28 A series of studies showed that
infants ‘tune’ their phonetic perceptions in accordance with the distribution of
sounds in the language they are acquiring, thus eventually losing the ability to
discriminate foreign sounds (Werker and Tees 1984, Kuhl et al. 1992).
This tuning occurs in the first year, before the learners have acquired a
lexicon. These results have led some to conclude that learners acquire the
phonemes of their language before they can produce or understand words. For
example, Pinker (1994: 264–5) describes the process as follows:
By six months, [babies] are beginning to lump together the distinct
sounds that their language collapses into a single phoneme, while
continuing to discriminate equivalently distinct ones that their
language keeps separate. By ten months...they do not distinguish
28 There are also studies showing that certain phonetic contrasts are not as well-discriminated by
infants as by adult native speakers (Aslin et al. 1981, Polka, Colantonio and Sundara 2001; see
also Weiss and Maye in press).
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