Over their 1st year of life, infants' "universal" perception of the sounds of language narrows to encompass only those contrasts made in their native language (J. F. Werker & R. C. Tees, 1984). This research tested 40 infants in an eyetracking paradigm and showed that this pattern also holds for infants exposed to seen language--American Sign…

Infant phonetic perception reorganizes in accordance with the native language by 10 months of age. One mechanism that may underlie this perceptual change is distributional learning, a statistical analysis of the distributional frequency of speech sounds. Previous distributional learning studies have tested infants of 6-8 months, an age at which…

The development of native language phonetic representations in bilingual infants was compared to that of monolingual infants. Infants (ages 6-8, 10-12, and 14-20 months) from English-French or English-only environments were tested on their ability to discriminate a French and an English voice onset time distinction. Although 6- to 8-month-olds…

Familiarized 6- and 8-month-olds with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. Found that only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. Results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the…

Tested in six experiments young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in faces and voices. Found that 4.5-month-olds showed no evidence of matching face and voice based on gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match based on the vowel. Robust evidence of ability to match based on gender was not evident…

Presented neonates with lexical and grammatical words prepared from natural maternal speech. Found that neonates could categorically discriminate the sets based on a constellation of perceptual cues that distinguished them. Suggested that this ability to discriminate words on basis of multiple acoustic/phonological cues provides a perceptual base…