ABSTRACT
Students of language acquisition have traditionally attached a lot of importance to the first word. Indeed, long before studies of infant speech perception, it was assumed that the beginnings of language acquisition coincided with the production of the first words. However, we now know that there is considerable activity relevant to language acquisition that takes place long before the child utters her first word. Thus, there are indications in the child’s own babbling, that these productions are being influenced by the sound structure of the native language (Boysson-Bardies, Hallé, Sagart, & Durand, 1989; Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, & Durand, 1984; Boysson-Bardies & Vihman, 1991; Levitt, 1993; Levitt & Wang, 1991; Whalen, Levitt, & Wang, 1991). Moreover, studies of perceptual capacities have revealed that young infants’ exhibit some very adult-like behaviors in dealing with information in the speech signal. Not only do they give evidence of discriminating a wide range of phonetic contrasts (Aslin, Pisoni, Hennessy, & Perey, 1981; Eimas, 1974; Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971; Levitt, Jusczyk, Murray, & Carden, 1988; Streeter, 1976; Trehub, 1976), but they seem to be able to recognize whether some utterance belongs to their native language or another language (Bahrick & Pickens, 1988; Mehler et al., 1988). In addition, they demonstrate some capacity to recognize different utterances of the same item despite the variability in the acoustic signal introduced by differences in talkers, speaking rate, or intonation patterns (Jusczyk, Pisoni, & Mullennix, 1992; Kuhl, 1980, 1983; Miller & Eimas, 1983).
