Fig. 1.

Two Mandarin Chinese consonant-vowel syllables used to test infant learning in Experiments 1 and 2, an affricate (A and C) and a fricative (B and D) syllable. Waveforms (A and B) show amplitude over time, and spectrographic representations (C and D) show frequency over time. The syllables have identical vowel formant frequencies (indicated in yellow) and differ only in the time at which maximum amplitude is reached during the initial 130-ms frication portion of the syllables (marked with red arrows on the waveforms and red circles on the spectrograms).