ABSTRACT
One of the most challenging issues in speech perception is distinguishing between effects that can be attributed to the operation of general auditory system processes and those that require a more specialized phonetic mechanism. The study of speech perception by animals and human infants provides a critical contribution to the “special mechanisms debate.” Animals clearly exhibit auditory-level processing but presumably do not have access to the kind of phonetic-level processing mechanism that has been postulated for humans. Prelinguistic human infants might be expected to fall somewhere in between at least on some tasks—exhibiting the rudiments of complex speech perception behavior characteristic of adult humans.
