How do statistical learning and perceptual reorganization alter Dutch infant’s perception to lexical tones?

![CDATA[Previous studies show that infants experience perceptual reorganization (PR) in the first year of life, after which their sensitivity towards most non-native speech contrasts greatly decreases. Also, it has been shown that infants can track distributional information from the ambient speech input. Dutch infants of 5-6 and 11-12 months were tested on their perception of a tonal contrast in Mandarin Chinese under uni/bimodal distributions. Results show that statistical learning influences infants’ discrimination of the non-native tonal contrast at 11-12 months, whereas this effect diminishes before the onset of tonal PR at 5-6 months. Two control groups of Dutch infants were tested on their discrimination to the same lexical tonal contrast without statistical exposure. Results showed that only young infants (5-6 months) but not older infants (11-12 months) discriminated the contrast. This not only supports earlier claims that tonal PR occurs at 6-9 months, but also reveals that the effects of PR can be partly reversed by distributional learning as 11-month-old infants’ perception of non-native tones was facilitated in the bimodal condition.]]