Volume 31, Issue 2

15 predominantly English-speaking, and 9 predominantly French-speaking kindergarten and grade one children served as subjects in an experiment designed to investigate discrimination learning of distinctive features. Stimuli were presented aurally and consisted of (a) meaningful non-linguistic sounds, (b) four non-nasalized vowels, (c) nasalized equivalents of the non-nasalized vowels. Results showed that: (a) linguistic stimuli were not as well learned as non-linguistic stimuli, (b) nasalized vowels were learned significantly less well than their non-nasalized equivalents, and (c) only the distinctive feature [± nasal] appeared to correlate with discrimination learning scores. The other features, [ ± round] and [ ± back], did not appear to operate independently in vowel perception. No evidence was obtained to support the hypothesis that one feature is more easily learned than other features within a discrimination learning task, or that a hierarchy governing the perception of distinctive features exists.