Abstract
At age 6 the ability to perceive all phonemic distinctions in natural language is about completely acquired, but some more complex phoneme processing capacities are still developing. We wondered whether there would also be a further development in perception tasks in which the ceiling effect is eliminated by greater perceptual difficulty. In this study synthetic speech stimuli on a stop consonant continuum from /p/ to /t/ were presented in identification tasks. Children at the start and near the and of first grade, third- and fourth-grade children either dyslexic, poorly performing, well performing or in special education, and adults were compared with respect to the slope and the phoneme boundary of their identification curves. It was found that, in general, with increasing age, the slope tends to become steeper, and the phoneme boundary is located at higher second formant values. Moreover, many of the youngest children could not consistently identify some stimuli.