LAUSR

The acquisition of speech perception skills is challenging for children. Although some studies have shown that categorical perception boundaries become steeper during childhood and are sometimes shifted in children compared to adults, very few experiments on discrimination abilities in children have been conducted. To investigate this, we conducted a perceptual discrimination task in school-aged children. Sixty-seven 6- to 12-year-old native Quebec French-speaking children were asked to complete a speech perception task that used an AXB scheme. The children were asked to discriminate synthesized 5-formant vowels belonging to three continuums: /i-e/ and /e-o/ (in which stimuli were equally stepped along F1) and /e-o/ (in which stimuli were equally stepped along F2). There was a significant effect of age on peak discrimination scores, with older children having higher peak scores than younger children. There was no effect of age on the location of the categorical boundary on the three tested continuums. The...