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Category: Philosophy and Psychology
Date Submitted: 03/24/2012 07:13 AM
3
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...