| Abstract | [Introduction]
The central concern of this chapter is with the nature of messages that prelinguistic infants may hear in human speech, at the level of the finer grained structures that we know as consonants and vowels. This issue has been addressed in the last twelve years of research on infant speech perception. Two basic themes about the information that infants perceive in speech have emerged. Both themes presume that some innate mechanism(s) of the auditory perceptual system fully account for infant speech perception, thus implying a mechanistic view that the young perceiver’s role in seeking information in speech is rather passive. According to the first theme, infants possess species-specialized perceptual mechanisms that are tuned to linguistic contrasts among phonemes, those individual consonants and vowels we adults often associate with letters of letter combinations in words. The other theme proposes that infant speech perception is shaped by the auditory system’s response to acoustic components of the stimulus; that is, the perceptual process is stimulus-bound and intrinsically neutral with respect to speech versus other sounds, These neutral acoustic attributes include the bits of noise and frequency changes, interspersed with silent gaps and humming or buzzing, which comprise a physical description of the speech signal. |
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