The modified bursts were then spliced back onto the vocalic portion.

Next, the initial F0 of this series was manipulated using PSOLA resynthesis. Pitch was shifted by an amount proportional to the VOT, started at the onset of the stimulus, remaining flat over the first 40 msec, and gradually reduced to the natural pitch by 100 msec. For VOTs of −40 msec, we subtracted 30 Hz from the onset pitch. For VOTs of 100 msec, we added 30 Hz (and interpolated for intermediate values2). The 60-Hz difference in pitch change was chosen to mirror that reported Selleck Pexidartinib in Bernstein (1983). The resulting continuum simultaneously varied in VOT (from −40 to +100), in F0 at onset (from −30 to +30 Hz over the unmodified pitch), and in amplitude of the burst (from 0% to 100% of the maximum value). Word lengths measured from consonant onset to vocalic closure varied systematically from 218 (0-msec VOT /buk/) to 258 (40-msec Pembrolizumab mouse prevoicing /buk/) to 318 msec (100-msec VOT /puk/). Tokens were again validated by adult listeners in a two-alternative forced-choice task: the boundary was between 15- and 20-msec VOT, with tokens less than 5-msec VOT reliably perceived as /buk/ and greater than 30-msec VOT reliably perceived as /puk/. As these values were consistent with Experiment 1, the tokens were assigned to the same statistical distribution as in Experiment 1, and

were chosen for habituation and test identically. Experimental set-up and procedures were identical to Experiment 1. Data were analyzed similar to Experiment 1, and results are shown in Figure 2. A repeated measures ANOVA found a main effect of test condition (same versus

switch versus control, F[2, 24] = 30.6, Depsipeptide p < .001). Planned comparisons again revealed that the effect was driven by responses to the control trial. Children looked at the control trial (M = 10.1 sec, SD = 2.5) significantly longer then the same and switch trials, F(1, 12) = 58.7, p < .001, but did not look differently at the same (M = 5.03 sec, SD = 2.37) and switch (M = 5.55 sec, SD = 3.28) trials, F(1, 12) = .56, p = .47. There was no effect of test order, F(1, 12) = 1.5, p = .24, or switch test word (/buk/ or /puk/, F < 1) and no two- or three-way interaction (all F < 1), indicating again that neither trial-order effects nor preference for either word affected responses. As in Experiment 1, infants in Experiment 2 failed to map words well enough to react to the change in word–object pairing at test. It seems that distributional statistics of constrastive cues in the exemplars can not account for the learning observed by Rost and McMurray (2009), even though those cues are fundamental to the voicing category. So, how did the infants in Rost and McMurray manage to learn the correct word–object mappings? A set of multitalker tokens naturally contains both contrastive and nonconstrastive variability.