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Language Perception Development

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From Discriminating to Discrimination

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Abstract

This chapter aims to address the role that discrimination plays in infant language development, considering experimental evidence of infants’ abilities to discriminate acoustic and distributional properties of speech throughout their first year of life. Newborns and infants are able to distinguish phonetic contrasts of all languages, to discriminate speech signals from other nonlinguistic sounds, and to differentiate languages that belong to different rhythmic families. In contact with a language community, their discrimination capacities decline, and infants show a perceptual narrowing, becoming specialized to detect segmental, suprasegmental, and distributional properties of the language they are learning. Speech perception plays an important role in language acquisition, as acoustical and distributional characteristics perceived by infants allow them to discover the language properties (grammatical structure and lexicon). Also, it has an impact on later language development and children’s social interactions with native and nonnative language speakers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Ethnologue (https://www.ethnologue.com), there are around 7,000 living languages, of which around 2% are sign languages and 42% are endangered languages. In this chapter, we will deal with perceptual skills involved in oral spoken language acquisition.

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  1. Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), NEALP/UFJF, CNPq, Juiz de Fora, Brazil

    Cristina Name

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  1. Cristina Name
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  1. Department Linguistics, Literature & Classics, São Paulo State University, Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil

    Alessandra Del Ré

  2. Institute for Social Work, Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Brandenburg, Germany

    Patrícia Falasca

  3. Institute for Social Work, Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Brandenburg, Germany

    Juliane Noack Napoles

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Name, C. (2022). Language Perception Development. In: Del Ré, A., Falasca, P., Noack Napoles, J. (eds) From Discriminating to Discrimination. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13544-6_2

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