Infant Speech Perception

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Infant Speech Perception

Derek Houston

Introduction

Speech perception can be described as a mode of hearing specialized for speech. When people engage in

conversation, they do not hear simply the information

conveyed in a waveform or a spectrogram. Instead,

they perceive linguistic and indexical information that

conveys words and sentences as well as identifying

qualitative characteristics of the talkers. People are

able to extract linguistic and indexical information

from speech because of the specialized way the human

hearing instrument is tuned. Accordingly, the study of

infant speech perception is concerned with the tuning

of that instrument during early development.

A complete understanding of how speech perception develops would require descriptions of the initial

and end states of infants’ speech perception and an

explanation of how the change of state happens. The

field of infant speech perception is not yet able to

describe with certainty exactly what information infants

perceive from speech at any stage of development or

what drives speech perception to change with development and language experience. Nevertheless, developmental scientists have made a great deal of progress

over the last 40 years toward these goals.

Early work in infant speech perception was strongly

influenced by Noam Chomsky’s theories, which were

revolutionizing the field of linguistics at the time.

Chomsky (1968, 1975) posited that language was not

learnable from the input alone and required a specialized universal language acquisition device that was

innately endowed to humans. Because of this prevailing view, most work focused on identifying speech

perception skills that were thought to be innate and

universal. Gradually, however, infant speech perception scientists have focused increasingly more on what

infants are able to learn from the input, and mounting

evidence suggests that general learning mechanisms

may play a larger role in language...