A series of experiments indicated that by 1 year of age, infants' perceptual categories correspond to linguistically significant categories. Developmental change between 6 and 12 months shows that perceptual abilities of the 1-year-old are not arbitrary, do not reflect all the discriminatory capabilities of the infant, and are similar to phonemic…

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…

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…