Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants

In the early months of life, infants acquire information about the phonetic properties of their native language simply by listening to adults speak. The acoustic properties of phonetic units in language input to young infants in the United States, Russia, and Sweden were examined. In all three countries, mothers addressing their infants produced acoustically more extreme vowels than they did when addressing adults, resulting in a “stretching ” of vowel space. The findings show that language input to infants provides exceptionally well-specified information about the linguistic units that form the building blocks for words. The emergence of language in a child de-pends on linguistic input. Socially isolated children (1), and profoundly deaf children who experience neither oral nor manual language (2), do not acquire language. Re-cent findings highlight the impact of natu-ral language input on normally developin