ArticleOpen mind : discoveries in cognitive science2021
Do Infants Really Learn Phonetic Categories?
Article in Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Phonological representation in English-learning infants' word comprehension.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- Predicting relative intelligibility from inter-talker distances in a perceptual similarity space for speech.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The acquisition of speech categories: Beyond perceptual narrowing, beyond unsupervised learning and beyond infancy.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2023Article
- The myth of categorical perception.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2022Review
- The nature of non-native speech sound representations.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2022Review
- Long-term priors constrain category learning in the context of short-term statistical regularities.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- Naturalistic speech supports distributional learning across contexts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Early changes in infants' ability to perceive native and nonnative speech sound contrasts are typically attributed to their developing knowledge of phonetic categories. We critically examine this hypothesis and argue that there is little direct evidence of category knowledge in infancy. We then propose an alternative account in which infants' perception changes because they are learning a perceptual space that is appropriate to represent speech, without yet carving up that space into phonetic categories. If correct, this new account has substantial implications for understanding early language development.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.