Perceiving speech: A developmental perspective
Janet F. Werker · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2000
The question of how we so instantaneously and effortlessly perceive the rapidly changing and highly encoded speech signal was one of the guiding questions in Alvin Liberman’s research career. From the original presentation of the ‘‘motor theory’’ through the rich body of research it generated and its subsequent revisions, he posed for the field a challenge to view speech in a radically different way from what he called the ‘‘dominant’’ view. On my first trip to Haskins Laboratories as a young graduate student, Alvin Liberman listened carefully to and took seriously the (naive) research questions I was attempting to ask about young infants, and challenged me to consider whether my approach was sufficiently rich to capture the essence of speech perception. That challenge continues to guide my work. In this talk I will present research that I (and others) have conducted with infants and young children in an attempt to understand the nature of speech perception in the young infant, and how that changes as a function of experience—both heard and seen—with the native language.