Understanding phonological acquisition through phonetic perception: The influence of exposure and acoustic salience

The change from universal to language-specific speech perception occurs in the second half of the first year. Through head turn preference procedures, we examined changes in Dutch infants’ perception of two consonant, one vowel, and two tonal contrasts at three time windows in the first year of life. Sensitivity to some, but not all, native and non-native contrasts followed the traditional perceptual tuning trajectory. We suggest that initial biases, linguistic exposure and acoustic salience are influential factors in the perceptual tuning process.