Development of speech perception

Abstract

Recent trends in research on speech perception development in infancy were outlined. The perspective in this paper focused on development of segmentation ability. Some basic abilities are necessary to understand the human voice as a language code for transmitting meaning. Infants must perceive sound signals which change according to the speaker and the utterance situation as a chain of consistent phonemes. In addition, they must extract the structural units of morphemes and words from continuous speech. The results of several researches indicate that cues for the word segmentation increase with infant development, and global features develop into fine features of speech.