Young infants respond to positive and negative speech prosody (A. Fernald, 1993), yet 4-year-olds rely on lexical information when it conflicts with paralinguistic cues to approval or disapproval (M. Friend, 2003). This article explores this surprising phenomenon, testing one hundred eighteen 2- to 5-year-olds' use of isolated pitch cues to…

Past research has uncovered a surprising paradox: Although 14-month-olds have exquisite phonetic discrimination skills (e.g., distinguishing [b] from [d]), they have difficulty using phonetic detail when mapping "novel" words to objects in laboratory tasks (confusing "bin" and "din"). While some have attributed infants' difficulty to immature word…