Six-month-old infants discriminate voicing on the basis of temporal envelope cues (L)

Young deaf children using a cochlear implant develop speech abilities on the basis of speech temporal-envelope signals distributed over a limited number of frequency bands. A Headturn Preference Procedure was used to measure looking times in 6-month-old, normal-hearing infants during presentation of repeating or alternating sequences composed of different tokens of /aba/and /apa/ processed to retain envelope information below 64 Hz while degrading temporal fine structure cues. Infants attended longer to the alternating sequences, indicating that they perceive the voicing contrast on the basis of envelope cues alone in the absence of fine spectral and temporal structure information.