Abstract

Purpose: This paper examined whether naïve listeners could perceive phonetic detail in children's productions of /s / and /T/, and whether their perception of /s / and /θ / could be biased by their belief about the child's overall speech-production ability. Method: In Experiment 1, listeners provided judgments of children's productions of /s / and /T/ using a visual analog scale (VAS). In Experiment 2, different listeners provided 'correct ' and 'incorrect ' judgments of the same tokens in a task in which they were led to believe that some children were older and had more-accurate speech, and others were younger and had lessaccurate speech. For Experiment 1, linear regression modeling was used to determine the relationship between VAS responses and psychoacoustic characteristics of the stimuli. For Experiment 2, within-subjects comparisons of accuracy judgments for the two conditions were conducted. Results: In Experiment 1, VAS judgments showed that listeners were able to perceive fine phonetic detail in children's productions, including differences between correct productions and clear substitutions. In Experiment 2, listener bias was found to have a small influence on listener

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