Language perception of 2-month-old infants shows effects of both innate mechanisms and experience.

Abstract

VOICING differences distinguish two or more stop consonants in nearly all the world's languages. It has been found1 that voicing distinctions for stops in word-initial postion can usually be characterised by differences in voice onset time (VOT), where VOT is defined as the time between the stop release burst and the onset of vocal cord vibration (Voicing). For example, the English phonemes /p/ and /b/ differ in this way; voicing follows release in /p/, while voicing is approximately simultaneous with release in /b/.