The origins of phonology and lexicon in infancy (OPAL): phonological abstraction before perceptual attunement?

Recently it was found that Dutch-speaking adults adopted from Korea at less than 6 months learned to perceive a Korean consonant contrast that is non- native in Dutch better than native Dutch speakers lacking Korean experience. They also better generalised that perceptual learning to other articulation places and to speech production. The inference that phonological abstraction occurs before 6 months, prior to language-specific attunement (6-10 months), begs direct evidence from infants. Our project, ‘Origins of Phonology and Lexicon’ (OPAL), is designed to address that lacuna. In this paper we (i) derive and describe tasks for evaluating three types of phonological abstraction: Protoword Structure, Phonological Inventories, and Phoneme Features; (ii) describe our method for testing these in infancy; and (iii) validate these tasks with adults. While adults showed differences among tasks, they were able to perform each abstraction with just one feedback trial, providing a firm basis for our ongoing infant studies.