Reassessing the labial-coronal asymmetry in infants’ discrimination of medial consonants

Asymmetric speech sound discrimination has been observed in both adults and infants. Here we focus on the labial-coronal asymmetry documented in Dutch- and Japanese-learning infants, who success-fully discriminate between /ɔmpa/ and /ɔnta/ only after habituation to /ɔmpa / (Tsuji et al., 2015). We hypothesized that this asymmetry is due to the inherent greater intensity of coronal compared to labial stop consonants. However, testing 64 French- and English-learning five-month-olds with Tsuji et al.’s stimuli, we observed successful discrimination regardless of language and of habituation condition, with only a numeric asymmetry in the predicted direction, i.e. a numerically larger looking time dif-ference between switch and same trials after habituation to /ɔmpa/ than to /ɔnta/. So, we propose alter-native ways to test our hypothesis in future research.