Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Infants make their first contacts with their native language through its sound patterns. Research over the past twenty years has demonstrated that infants are well-equipped to perceive subtle distinctions in speech sounds and to cope with the variability that is present in the speech signal. At the same time, it is clear that in order to progress in acquiring a language, infants need to learn about the particular characteristics of the sounds and combinations of sounds that are used in their native language. Recent findings suggest that the time between 6 and 9 months of age may be a particularly fertile one for learning about the sound patterns of one's native language. There are indications that infants are developing sensitivity to distributional properties of sounds in the input at this time. The implications of these findings have for our understanding of processes underlying language acquisition will be considered.