An acoustic perspective on 45 years of infant speech perception, Part 1: Consonants

Abstract

AbstractIn this two‐part review, we examine major results from infant consonant (Part 1), vowel, and suprasegmental (Part 2) discrimination research over the past 45 years from an acoustic perspective—an exegesis of the developmental speech perception literature that appeals to both acoustic aspects of speech contrasts and historically relevant typological facts about the sound systems of the world's languages. We argue that infants' speech discrimination abilities are best viewed through a lens that considers both synchronic and diachronic aspects of the particular speech contrast. The key to this approach is the notion that acoustic–perceptual salience, or the relative separation of speech categories along perceptually relevant acoustic dimensions and corresponding discrimination performance in adults, is reflected in both infants perceptual performance and patterns observed in phonological typology and history. The review highlights challenges presented by four decades of literature, identifies broad patterns in infant consonant perception according to the acoustic properties of speech contrasts, and offers linguistically motivated explanations and directions for future research into the nature of young infants' discrimination abilities.