Previous studies have suggested that the perception of vowels and consonants changes from language-universal to language-specific between 6 and 12 months of age. This report suggests that language-specific perception emerges even earlier for lexical tones. Experiment 1 tested English-learners' perception of Cantonese tones, replicating declines in…

Infants become selectively sensitive to phonological distinctions relevant to their native language at an early age. One might expect that infants bring some of this phonological knowledge to bear in encoding the words they subsequently acquire. In line with this expectation, studies have found that 14-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations…