Washington: Infants can recognise the majority of sounds soon after birth and begin to become language-specific listeners by the age of one, according to a recent study.
Researchers are still trying to find out how babies identify which acoustic features of their language are contrastive, a linguistic term that captures distinctions between speech sounds that can modify word meanings. In English, for example, the letters [b] and [d] are contrastive because altering the [b] in 'ball' to a [d] creates a new word, 'doll.'
