350 WORD DISCUSSION PROMPT

In chapter 3 you learned about the early “tuning” of speech perception in young infants (see pp.87-89) and the film, Early Learning, the Brain and Society by Patricia Kuhl, Dr. Kuhl introduced you to her mechanism underlying this critical period in language development. What mechanisms support infants’ ability to perceive the sounds of language during the first year of life? Some argue that that infants use domain-general abilities, like statistical learning, to perceive the sounds of language. Still others argue that children acquire rules or patterns from language input. Others claim that perceiving the sounds of language is guided by properties of language such as infant directed speech. More recently, some have proposed that the critical period seen in perception of sounds from all languages in the world can be explained by neural commitment, in which the neural underpinnings of speech perception is molded by early language input. Models of early phonological development focus on accounting for the phenomena that have been observed in studies of infant speech perception and on linking those phenomena to aspects of later language development.