Organization in infant speech perception.

Abstract

Infants [human] are capable of distinguishing speech contrasts that are differentiated by a single acoustic parameter and they perceive these distinctions in terms of adult phonetic categories. Whether infants perceive organization in speech (specifically, whether they are sensitive not only to individual elements, but also to the combination of elements that comprise basic units) was studied. Infants (2-4 mo. old) perceive organization at both the syllabic and segmental levels: infants noticed the rearrangement of consonants and vowels to form new syllables and the rearrangement of phonetic feature values to form new phonetic segments. The assumption that very young infants have quite sophisticated speech perception abilities, which constitute an important prerequisite for the acquisition of language was supported.