Question

5. In Peter Eimas's (1971) study, he habituated infants to the /ba/ sound and then played infants a sound that was 20 milliseconds different (VOT), which is perceived as /pa/ by adults versus a sound that was also 20 milliseconds different (VOT) but is still perceived as /ba/ by adults. What did he find?

Answer 1

Answer: Infants dishabituated to /pa/ but not the "new" /ba/.

Explanation:

Before the study by Peter Eimas and colleagues (Brown University, 1971) psychologists were unsure whether or not infants could recognize different phonemes.

Eimas found that even young infants seemed to recognize the difference between a ‘b’ sound and a ‘p’ sound.

Such results imply that we are born with the ability to categorize even imperceptibly different sounds, which is one of the basic elements of language learning.