Attunement theories of speech perception development suggest that native‐language exposure is one of the main factors shaping infants' phonemic discrimination capacity within the second half of their first year. Here, we focus on the role of acoustic–perceptual salience and language‐specific experience by assessing the discrimination of acoustically subtle Basque sibilant contrasts. We used the infant‐controlled version of the habituation procedure to assess discrimination in 6‐ to 7‐month and 11‐ to 12‐month‐old infants who varied in their amount of exposure to Basque and Spanish. We observed no significant variation in the infants' discrimination behavior as a function of their linguistic experience. Infants in both age‐groups exhibited poor discrimination, consistent with Basque adults finding these contrasts more difficult than some others. Our findings are in agreement with previous research showing that perceptual discrimination of subtle speech sound contrasts may follow a different developmental trajectory, where increased native‐language exposure seems to be a requisite.

中文翻译：

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正在构建的音位对比？来自巴斯克的证据。

言语知觉发展的调谐理论表明，母语接触是影响婴儿第一年下半年音素辨别能力的主要因素之一。在这里，我们通过评估声学上微妙的巴斯克咝咝声对比的辨别力，专注于声学感知显着性和语言特定体验的作用。我们使用婴儿控制版本的习惯程序来评估 6 至 7 个月和 11 至 12 个月大的婴儿对巴斯克语和西班牙语的接触量不同的歧视。我们没有观察到婴儿的歧视行为作为他们语言经验的函数的显着变化。两个年龄组的婴儿都表现出较差的辨别力，与巴斯克成年人一致认为这些对比比其他一些更难。我们的研究结果与之前的研究一致，表明对细微语音对比的感知辨别可能遵循不同的发展轨迹，其中增加母语接触似乎是必要条件。