The Infant’s Auditory World: Hearing, Speech, and the Beginnings of Language

INFANT AUDITION 59 Development of the Auditory Apparatus: Setting the Stage 59 Measuring Auditory Development 60 Frequency Coding 61 Intensity Coding 63 Temporal Coding 67 Spatial Resolution 69 Development of Auditory Scene Analysis 70 Implications for the Development of Speech Perception 71 INFANT SPEECH PERCEPTION AND WORD LEARNING: BEGINNINGS OF LANGUAGE 72 Emergence of the Field: Phonetic Perception 72 A Preference for Speech 75 Perception of the Visible Information in Speech 76 Perception of Prosodic Attributes of the Speech Signal 77 Perception of Other Aspects of the Speech Signal 78 IMPLICIT DISCOVERY OF CUES IN THE INPUT: A DRIVE TO MAKE SENSE OF THE ENVIRONMENT 80 Stress and Phonotactic Cues 80 Higher-Level Units 81 LEARNING MECHANISMS 81 Units for Computations 83 BUILDING FROM THE INPUT DURING THE 1ST YEAR 83 Learning Phonology and Phonotactics 84 Word Segmentation 84 Beginnings of Word Recognition 88 Listening for Meaning 89 Beginnings of Grammar 91 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS 92 Relationship between Auditory Processing and Speech Perception 92 Constraints on Learning 93 Domain Specificity and Species Specificity 93 The Infant’s Auditory World 94 REFERENCES 95