Phonological Awareness

Abstract

This study aims at getting a better understanding of human speech processing, and explores specifically the task that infants face while learning their native language. Indeed, this work sheds light on 30 years of research that have questioned the developments in early infancy that allow word learning to proceed rapidly before two years of age. Infants are born with Perceptual biases that facilitate attention to speech and the encoding of its properties over the first several months of life, infants' perceptual biases increasingly conform to native language patterns. By the end of this study, it is suggested that word learning is another bootstrapping phenomenon in developmental research. It does not mean it can be reduced to perceptual and learning. Instead, we argue that perceptual learning provides a foundation upon which abstract linguistic units can be built. Just as phonological patterns act as cues to morphological and syntactic structure, and just as naive concepts allow infants to learn more complex ones, perceptual learning allows segmentation and representation of word forms that, once mapped to concepts, bootstrap the process of word learning and lead to a qualitative improvement in its efficiency.