The practice of playing taped spoken French just before the beginning of a regular foreign language class rests on the premise that regular exposure to unedited foreign speech sensitizes one to its unique intonation, rhythm, and sounds. It is hypothesized that the ability to identify a language may be the first step in listening. A review of…

A series of experiments investigated infants' perception of inherent structural organization in the prosody of utterances. The experiments used a listening preference procedure to test: perceptions of appropriate pauses in child-directed and adult-directed speech; perceptions of appropriate pauses in speech filtered for most segmental features but…