Phonemic Discrimination and Eye-Movements in Infants

The ability to discriminate between different phonemes is a crucial part of language development in the first year of life. While language acquisition is a process that has been studied in both infants and adults in the past, the paradigms that were used to study this sensitive process have a number of shortcomings. To overcome these shortcomings, the present study examined 6-month-old infants' ability to discriminate between two different phonemes by means of an eye-tracking task, the Visual Expectation Cueing Paradigm (VExCP). In this paradigm, one randomly presented phoneme (paired with a central visual stimulus) predicted a visual target on the right side of a monitor screen and the other randomly presented phoneme predicted a visual target on the left side of the screen. If the infants could discriminate between the different phonemes then they would be able to correctly make anticipatory eye movements to the target location at a rate above chance. Results indicated that 6-month-old infants successfully discriminated between the two different phonemes forming an expectation for the phoneme-target location relations, and thereby making correct anticipatory eye-movements to the correct target location at a rate greater than chance. The findings indicate that the VExCP is an appropriate paradigm for the study of phonemic discrimination while overcoming the weaknesses of previously used paradigms.