The role of attention in speech perception by young infants

The present study explored how attentional focus affects the perception of speech in 4-day-old and 2-month-old infants. Attentional focus was manipulated by changing the composition of a set of syllables to which infants were habituated. In the first experiment, we familiarized infants with sets of stimuli that included members judged to be near neighbors in perceptual space (Shepard,1972). Under these conditions, both 4-day-olds and 2-month-olds were able to detect the addition of a new syllable to the set. In the second experiment, one of the familiarization sets was chosen to include members that were perceptually very dissimilar. In this situation, the 2-month-olds, but not the 4-day-olds, were able to detect the addition of a new syllable that was similar to one of the familiarization set members. These results have some interesting implications for the way in which basic speech perception capacities are attuned to sound structure of the native language.