ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the development of speech perception in relation to speech exposure and brain maturation. It shows how children learn to recognize their native language from other acoustic signals and aims to decompose it into meaningful units: into sounds, into suprasegmental units, and finally, into words. The primary source of speech is vocal fold vibration, resulting in voiced sounds with a fundamental frequency, which is perceived as pitch. The universally listening newborn discriminates well between some speech sound contrasts and more poorly between some other contrasts, and exposure to the full speech spectrum as transmitted through air will enable her or him to perceptually attune to her or his native language. Discrimination between speech sounds has so far been described as a symmetrical behavior, being equally strong from one member of the contrast to the other as vice versa. Native speech perception requires the acquisition of symmetrical discrimination between phonemically contrastive speech sounds.
