Revisiting Roger Brown’s "Original Word Game": An Experimental Approach to the Pseudo-Semantic Basis of Language-Specific Speech Perception in Late Infancy

Recent experimental research in developmental phonology confinns that within their first year, infants demonstrate language-sp~ific patterns of speech perception discrimination. Data, however, outpaces theory in this line of research. For wtaile it is clear that this transition is related to the particular linguistic environment of the infant, it remains obscure whether mere acoustic exposure to-as opposed to interpretive expe~qenee with-the target language is sufficient to support he details of this development. The logical dynamic languagespecific allophonic variation imposes on phonological development is integrated into an account of the transition from language-general to language-specific stxx~h perception obsen,ed mthin the first year of infancy. An experiment, reminiscent of Brown’s "Original Word Game", but specifically designed to test the "cognitive" hsq~othesis that 8to 10-month old subjects can exploit nascent sixx~ch-referent pairs to bootstrap phonological development is proposed. The child passes through words to the phonemic perception of speech.