ABSTRACT
In summary, we argued that in order to fully understand the role of the input on infant speech processing it is necessary to describe not only the changing characteristics of the input, the language processing biases infants bring to the input at any point in time, and the joint influence of these two, but also any emergent skills in perceptual and cognitive analysis that infants may bring to the speech processing task. We anticipate that this approach to understanding age-related changes in speech processing will help bridge the gap between research in infant speech perception and research in child language acquisition. We suggest that because even the simplified speech directed to infants conveys multiple levels of information in a simultaneous fashion, it is essential to fully describe the changing capabilities of infants in order to fully understand the phenomenon of bootstrapping. Otherwise, we have no way of knowing just what information in the speech stream infants are perceiving, and we have no way of knowing just what functional linguistic task that information is serving. Thus, only with some guiding notions concerning the linguistic and perceptual biases of infants at different 444ages and the domain-general abilities infants have available to apply to the perceptual/linguistic information they detect, can we make continuing progress in understanding the bootstrapping question. In other words, until we put the baby into the bootstraps, we will be unable to fully understand the role the input plays in language processing.
