How do babies learn sounds in their native language?

Babies can distinguish most sounds soon after birth, and by the age of 1, they become listeners of a particular language

A recent paper by two computational linguists at the University of Maryland in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) offers new insights into the topic, which is necessary

Their study suggests that infants' ability to interpret acoustic differences as contrasting or non-contrasting may come from the environment in

For a long time, researchers thought that there would be a clear difference

Kasia Hitczenko, the paper's first author, said: "This is one of the first descriptions of speech learning to prove to work on spontaneous data, suggesting which sound dimensions

Hitczenko graduated from the University of Maryland in 2019 with a Ph.

Hitczenko's research suggests that babies can distinguish sounds based on background cues, such as neighboring sounds

The researchers collected the sounds that appeared in different contexts and drew graphs that summarized the vowel durations

"We believe this study provides a convincing explanation of phonetic comparisons about how babies learn their language, and shows that the necessary signals are present in natural language, contributing to our understanding of early language learning," said co-author Naomi Feldman, associate professor

Feldman added that the signals they studied apply to most languages, and their results could most likely be generalized to other comparisons

The recently published study is an extension of Hitczenko's doctoral dissertation, which examines how to use context for speech learning and perception

Feldman is Hitczenko's academic advisor in Maryland, and they have both completed extensive research in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory, which is supported

Naturalistic speech supports distributional learning across contexts