Native Listening

Understanding speech in our native tongue seems natural and effortless; listening to
speech in a nonnative language is a different experience. In this book, Anne Cutler argues that
listening to speech is a process of native listening because so much of it is exquisitely tailored
to the requirements of the native language. Her cross-linguistic study (drawing on experimental work
in languages that range from English and Dutch to Chinese and Japanese) documents what is universal
and what is language specific in the way we listen to spoken language.

Cutler
describes the formidable range of mental tasks we carry out, all at once, with astonishing speed and
accuracy, when we listen. These include evaluating probabilities arising from the structure of the
native vocabulary, tracking information to locate the boundaries between words, paying attention to
the way the words are pronounced, and assessing not only the sounds of speech but prosodic
information that spans sequences of sounds. She describes infant speech perception, the consequences
of language-specific specialization for listening to other languages, the flexibility and
adaptability of listening (to our native languages), and how language-specificity and universality
fit together in our language processing system. Drawing on her four decades of work as a
psycholinguist, Cutler documents the recent growth in our knowledge about how spoken-word
recognition works and the role of language structure in this process. Her book is a significant
contribution to a vibrant and rapidly developing field.