The Discovery of Spoken Language

Speech carries information about the structure and organization of language. Yet,
speech is normally produced as a continuous stream without clearly demarcated boundaries between
words. A fundamental problem for any language learner is to segment speech in a way that correctly
identifies the words of the language. This is a crucial step toward building a lexicon and learning
about the grammatical organization of the language.

The Discovery of
Spoken Language marks one of the first efforts to integrate the field of infant speech
perception research into the general study of language acquisition. It fills in a key part of the
acquisition story by providing an extensive review of research on the acquisition of language during
the first year of life, focusing primarily on how normally developing infants learn the organization
of native language sound patterns.

Peter Jusczyk examines the initial capacities
that infants possess for discriminating and categorizing speech sounds and how these capacities
evolve as infants gain experience with native language input. Considerable attention is paid to ways
speech perception capacities develop so that listeners can recognize words in fluent speech. Jusczyk
also looks at how infants' growing knowledge of native language sound patterns may facilitate the
acquisition of other aspects of language organization and discusses the relationship between the
learner's developing capacities for perceiving and producing speech. An appendix reviews the test
procedures used to evaluate infant speech perception capacities.
 
The Discovery of Spoken Language marks one of the first efforts
to integrate the field of infant speech perception research into the general study of language
acquisition. It fills in a key part of the acquisition story by providing an extensive review of
research on the acquisition of language during the first year of life, focusing primarily on how
normally developing infants learn the organization of native language sound
patterns.

Peter Jusczyk examines the initial capacities that infants possess for
discriminating and categorizing speech sounds and how these capacities evolve as infants gain
experience with native language input. Jusczyk also looks at how infants' growing knowledge of
native language sound patterns may facilitate the acquisition of other aspects of language
organization and discusses the relationship between the learner's developing capacities for
perceiving and producing speech.