Abstract
It is an honor and a pleasure to offer my reflections on Werker and Tees’ (1984) landmark report about language environment influences on infant speech perception. The paper stands as a model of research design, from its careful stimulus development, to its thoughtful adaptation of testing procedures, to its inclusion of both cross-sectional and longitudinal data. More important, however, is the substantive impact it has had on research and theory in early speech/language development. Its basic finding has become a widely-accepted developmental fact: the language environment dramatically affects infants’ perception of non-native phonetic contrasts by sometime in the second half-year of life. Numerous studies in Werker’s and other labs have extended this line of investigation to other non-native consonant and vowel contrasts. Those findings, in turn, have led to a deeper, more refined understanding of the developmental pattern, and to the positing of several theoretical accounts of experiential effects in infant speech perception. From a broader, retrospective view, their report has played an instrumental role in the shift of infant speech research from the preceding near-exclusive focus on inborn, universal phonetic abilities, to the complementary emphasis on infants’ dawning recognition of key properties of the ambient language which remains at the core of much contemporary investigation on the early ontogeny of language. All the more remarkable, Werker was still a graduate student when she put together an infant speech perception lab to pursue with Tees this insightful extension of his work on the effects of early experience on basic visual and auditory perception.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Infant Behavior & Development |
Publication status | Published - 2002 |
Keywords
- infants
- language
- speech perception in infants