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tation neral 06 using various cues found in adult speech, infants gradually come to understand and use their native language. For example, between 6 generally track head or eye movements and record duration of response patterns that researchers have used to suggest models of infant development, and results based on these methods have revealed remarkable cognitive advances within infantsT firstolder infants, a task that is difficult to accomplish without the use of attention-getting visual stimuli. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. InfantsT ability to perceive speech begins in the womb and progresses dramatically during the first year of life (DeCasper and Fifer, 1980; Werker and Tees, 1984). Research indicates that, during the last trimester in-utero (Mehler et al., 1988) and in the first 12 months of life post-natally (Jusczyk, 1997), infants become aware of and adjust to regularities in their native language. By orientation time (Jusczyk, 1997). Like the pacifier method used for younger infants, such methods use a contingency dynamic where the infant receives additional stimuli in response to sustained looking time in a particular direction. Some paradigms use auditory stimuli alone, measuring duration of head-turns oriented towards the source of the stimuli (e.g., Kemler-Nelson et al., 1995), while others use both linguistic and visual stimuli, measuring duration of looking towards consistent and inconsistent pairings (e.g., Stager and Werker, 1997). Visual stimuli can also be used to maintain infantsT attention, either between or during presentation of linguistic stimuli (e.g., Cooper et al., 1997). Results obtained fro