Resumen de Before phonemes: infants start building the native phoneme repertoire
Infants start their lives with a universal ability to perceive speech and during the first months of life they attune to the language(s) they are exposed to in their environment, i.e. perceptual narrowing. Research has focused on infants’ capacities to discriminate native and non-native speech contrasts as a sign of this tuning, starting at 6 months of age for vowels (Kuhl et al., 1992; Polka & Werker, 1994). We investigated whether infants before the first signs of perceptual narrowing have some proto-segmental information in place. To do so we ran a series of experiments on the abilities of infants to discriminate languages that differ in their vowel distribution. We also tested infants’ preference to lists of nonwords that abide to the vowel distribution of their native language or not. We found that infants succeeded in both tasks suggesting that infants have in place an early representation of the native vowel space. Therefore, we provide compelling evidence that phonetic knowledge emerges earlier than proposed before.
