Organization in infant speech perception.

Over the past few years it has become increasingly clear that infants are capable of distinguishing speech contrasts that are differentiated by a single acoustic parameter and, moreover, that they perceive these distinctions in terms of adult phonetic categories. Three experiments with 200 2–4 mo olds examined whether infants also 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. Data show that Ss perceived organization at both the syllabic and segmental levels: Ss noticed the rearrangement of consonants and vowels to form new syllables and the rearrangement of phonetic feature values to form new phonetic segments. These findings provide further support for the assumption that very young infants have quite sophisticated speech perception abilities that constitute an important prerequisite for the acquisition of language. (French abstract) (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)