ABSTRACT
In the past 30 years, the study of cognitive development has greatly advanced. Newborn infants are now recognized as being very efficient perceptual processors. They can discriminate various stimuli on the basis of minimal distinctive features. They are able to categorize different kinds of stimuli, indicating that they can extract some common property shared by different items. All these processes have been well documented, if as yet not completely understood, in the visual domain as well as in the auditory domain, especially that of speech perception. However, the auditory processing of speech has certain specific characteristics beyond the general properties common to any system of information processing. It is the aim of the present chapter to focus on some specific aspects of speech processing and of its development.
