ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews several studies that have tried to demonstrate an effect of experience on the way in which young infants discriminate speech sound categories. It is paradoxical that some of those who have argued against a phonetic interpretation of infant's categorical discrimination of speech have argued for an effect of experience on infant's speech discrimination. In specifying phonetic input, another striking problem arises when we try to identify stops in continuous speech for placement into the appropriate voicing categories. For experience to affect infant's discrimination of stop voicing contrasts that are phonemic for the language to be learned, it argues that the infant must have a strategy for achieving the primary goal of phonological development. The choice of which phonetic feature distinguish voiced from voiceless stops in American English speech therefore depends, in part, on who is speaking and the position in the utterance where the stops to be contrasted occur.
