Peter Eimas and his colleagues (1971) studied speech perception in infants using a combination of high amplitude sucking and habituation. In their procedure they would habituate infants to one sound, such as a “pa” sound, and then test them both on a novel “ba” sound and to a novel "pa" sound. Using this method, what have researchers found about infant speech perception?

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

In analyzing this classic study on infant speech perception, I’ll evaluate each option in light of what Eimas and colleagues demonstrated and the broader literature on perceptual development in infancy.
Option 1: 'Between birth and 1 month of age, infants from all language cultures can hear the distinctions between sounds from all languages.' This statement overstates the uniformity and persistence of non-native sound discrimination. Newborns do show a remarkable ability to discriminate many phonetic contrasts across languages, but the claim that they hear distinctions from all languages between birth and 1 month is too broad and not precisely supported by the specific habituation findings, which show sensitivity to contrasts but do not imply universal discrimination for all languages at that narrow early window.
Option 2: 'At birth, infants are unable to hear the distinctions between any languages.' This is incorrect. The evidence from Eimas and others indicates that newborns can perceive and discriminate a range of speech sounds, including contrasts that are not present in their native language, so saying they are unable to hear distinctions at birth is false.
Option 3: 'Between 6 and 12 months, infants begin to lose the ability to hear speech distinctions not used in the language they are learning.' This captures a key developmental trend known as perceptual narrowing: as infants are exposed more to their native language, they become less capable of distinguishing non-native contrasts. It states a loss of non-native distinctions in a window that aligns with the developmental literature, though one could nuance the exact timing. Overall, it correctly describes a decline in sensitivity to non-native contrasts over the first year.
Option 4: 'As infants learn a particular language, they acquire the ability to hear the sounds of that language.' This reflects the idea of perceptual tuning to native phonetic categories as exposure increases; it is consistent with the concept that experience with the native language shapes perception. While this is true in a developmental sense, it doesn’t directly summarize the early habituation findings about the existence of broader non-native discrimination and the later narrowing process.
In summary, Option 2 is clearly incorrect due to misrepresenting newborn perception. Option 1 overclaims the scope of early discrimination. Option 3 accurately captures the perceptual narrowing process observed as infants age and become more specialized in their native language contrasts. Option 4 describes an important aspect of developmental tuning but is more focused on the outcome of learning a language rather than the specific experimental findings of early habituation and discrimination shown by Eimas. The best-matched interpretation to the described method and findings is the idea of narrowing of non-native distinctions during the first year, which aligns with the observed shift in sensitivity over time.

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