Speech carries information about the structure and organization of                  language. Yet, speech is normally produced as a continuous stream without clearly                  demarcated boundaries between words. A fundamental problem for any language learner                  is to segment speech in a way that correctly identifies the words of the language.                  This is a crucial step toward building a lexicon and learning about the grammatical                  organization of the language.The Discovery of Spoken Language marks one of the first                  efforts to integrate the field of infant speech perception research into the general                  study of language acquisition. It fills in a key part of the acquisition story by                  providing an extensive review of research on the acquisition of language during the                  first year of life, focusing primarily on how normally developing infants learn the                  organization of native language sound patterns.Peter Jusczyk examines the initial                  capacities that infants possess for discriminating and categorizing speech sounds                  and how these capacities evolve as infants gain experience with native language                  input. Considerable attention is paid to ways speech perception capacities develop                  so that listeners can recognize words in fluent speech. Jusczyk also looks at how                  infants' growing knowledge of native language sound patterns may facilitate the                  acquisition of other aspects of language organization and discusses the relationship                  between the learner's developing capacities for perceiving and producing speech. An                  appendix reviews the test procedures used to evaluate infant speech perception                  capacities.

The Discovery of Spoken Language (Language, Speech, and Communication) PDF

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