How Infants Adapt Speech-Processing Capacities to Native-Language Structure

As infants learn the sound organization of their native language, they use this developing knowledge to make their first attempts to extract the underlying structure of utterances. Although these first attempts fail to capture the full complexity of features that adults use in perceiving and producing utterances, they provide learners with the opportunity to discover additional cues to the underlying structure of the language. Three examples of this developmental pattern are considered: learning the rhythmic organization of the native language, segmenting words from fluent speech, and identifying the correct units of grammatical organization.