Addresses questions about infant perceptual ability and the possibility of its decline as a function of development in the absence of specific experience. Compares English-speaking adults, Hindi-speaking adults, and 7-month-old infants on their ability to discriminate two pairs of natural Hindi (non-English) speech contrasts. (Author/RH)

Several studies have begun to investigate the claim that children can make most phonological discriminations when they begin to speak. This paper investigates how well children aged 2;3 to 2;11 can discriminate between pairs of minimally different real words, and it shows that the results are affected by how well the children know the words. It is…