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Speech Processing
From birth, infants demonstrate a general preference for speech over a range of other nonspeech auditory stimuli, suggesting a bias for human speech. This potential bias may draw infants into the auditory world and facilitate the processing of speech over the course of development. Indeed, early experience with language prior to birth may help form this bias and may be responsible for early speech preferences, such as a mother's voice, native language rhythm, and familiar stories. Experience with the ambient language continues to shape infants' processing of the speech signal over the first year of life. During this time, infants are learning about sounds, sound patterns, and prosodic information (rhythm, stress, and intonation) specific to their language, and they are simultaneously using this information to find and learn words.
General Processing of Speech
Experience with language even prior to birth influences neonates' preferences for global aspects of speech signals. For example, infants prefer listening to stories that were read to them during the last few weeks of pregnancy over novel stories, and they also prefer to listen to their mother's voice compared to other female voices. Newborns also show sensitivity to the rhythmical properties of language. Rhythm refers to the timing and organization of units in speech. A language can fall into one of several rhythmical classes—stress timed (e.g., English), syllable timed (e.g., French), or mora timed (e.g., Japanese). Newborns discriminate between languages based on different rhythmical classes, and by 2 to 4 months, they discriminate languages from within a single rhythmical class (e.g., English and Dutch). This sensitivity to the rhythmical properties of language may help to lay the foundation for speech segmentation by highlighting units for segmentation.
Basic psychoacoustic (physiological and psychological responses) and cognitive capabilities essential for processing speech input appear to be available to infants at birth. When neonates are presented with speech, there is greater activation in the left hemisphere than the right. Interestingly, this is not the case when neonates are presented with temporally reversed speech. A potentially very useful starting point for processing the speech signal is a bias or preference for speech over other types of sounds, and indeed this appears to be the case as young infants listen longer to speech over closely matched nonspeech signals. Infants also prefer to listen to speech that is directed toward them. This type of infant-directed speech tends to have exaggerated vowels and greater pitch variation, and caregivers tend to use shorter sentences and repeat more items. Attending to infant-directed speech may play an important functional role in infants' linguistic and socioemotional development. Indeed, infant-directed speech may facilitate speech segmentation, and it has been linked with the transmission and reciprocity of emotional affect. A preference for speech in general and for infant-directed speech in the first year of life appears to be related to later vocabulary size, suggesting it may set the foundation for subsequent language development.
Learning About Sounds and Sequences
From birth, infants show a remarkable ability to discriminate a range of speech sounds found in the world's languages. Over the course of the first year, they begin to show better discrimination of sounds that occur in their native language than those that do not. During this time, infants are also learning about sound combinations (phonotactics), prosody (rhythm, stress, and intonation), and words. This experience with one's native language plays an important role in many aspects of early speech development and the processing of the speech signal.
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