The development of phonological categories in children's perception of final stop voicing in English

Adults perceive phonological contrasts by using multiple acoustic cues, and their relative attention to the various cues for a phonological category - their cue weighting - appears to be learned on a language-specific basis. Adults' cue weighting depends on the information available from other cues (as in trading relations), which varies with neighbouring segments (as in context effects). Children's perception begins to attune to the native language in the first year of life (e.g. Werker & Tees, 1984). But it remains noticeably immature in early childhood (e.g. 3 to 7 years). Exactly how children's perceptual phonological categories differ from adults' is controversial. Some research (e.g Nittrouer & Studdert-Kennedy, 1987) suggests that children weight formant transitions more heavily. Other research (e.g. Allen & Norwood 1988; Gerrits, 200I) provides evidence against this. Instead, children may simply weight one cue more heavily than others, due to cognitive and psychoacoustic limitation s and lesser linguistic experience. This paper presents results from identification and discrimination experiments on the use of preceding vowel length and first formant offset frequency in the perception of final stop voicing in Australian English by 5-year -olds and adults, in terms or trading relations among acoustic cues and their integration