ABSTRACT
Psycholinguists interested in speech development need to address the question of when infants begin to extract regularities from the language to be learned. Two possible landmarks have been successively proposed. The first one, which has always been strongly emphasized, is the appearance of phonological rules in infants’ vocal productions. The second one—proposed more recently—is the appearance of language-specific influences in the phonetic and intonational patterns of productions. Since the early 1980s, our program of research was devoted to the latter aspect; it was largely based on the rationale of crosslinguistic comparisons of prespeech (and early speech) productions between French infants and infants from other linguistic environments.
