ABSTRACT
Awareness of children’s hearing behaviour forms the basis for eliciting parental concerns and behavioural tests of hearing. At birth, infants show a preference for their mother’s speech, likely to be based on their well-established ability to hear from about 3 months before birth. Newborns are able to discriminate between the general direction of a sound (left or right, far or near), but orienting towards more subtle variations in location improves over the next 6 months. Infants can discriminate vowels after birth; by 2-3 months they can discriminate the fine differences between phonemes such as /da/, /ba/ and /pa/, and by 6 months their speech discrimination is well refined. In some aspects, infants’ speech perception is superior to that of adults, and before 6 months of age, they can discriminate speech sounds in their own and in other languages. By 10-12 months, however, infant sound perception becomes much more adult-like, with reduced perception of sounds in other languages. Children growing up in bilingual families, however, maintain their ability for sound discrimination for the languages used.
