The future of infant speech perception research: Gotta wear shades

The future of infant speech perception research is very bright in large part because of the legacy left to us by Peter W. Jusczyk. I will selectively review a number of studies, many of them conducted by Peter and his colleagues, that I consider to be especially interesting and/or provocative and that have helped to advance our understanding of the development of speech perception. For example, in two fairly recent studies, 4.5 to 6-month-old infants were shown to display some incipient spoken word recognition ability [D. R. Mandel et al., Psychol. Sci. 6, 314–317 (1995); R. Tincoff and P. W. Jusczyk, ibid. 10, 172–175 (1999)]. In effect, these studies have smashed the sound-meaning barrier that was, according to traditional estimates, placed somewhere between 9 and 13 months of age and have important implications for current developmental theory. This work is also illustrative of one trend apparent in recent research, namely, to accord greater attention to infants’ perception of ecologically-relevant stimuli and/or their perception of speech stimuli in ecologically-relevant contexts. Still, there is much to be learned about spoken word recognition beyond infancy and before adulthood if we are to arrive at a complete picture of this core aspect of spoken language processing.