Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Infants Build Knowledge and Skills?
Use the age and language comparisons to examine perceptual specialization. Connect their interpretation to the earlier warning that a behavioral criterion is not a direct reading of an underlying capacity.
A question to consider. Which comparison best challenges a general age-related decline in task engagement, and what would establish that particular experience contributes to the change?
Why this reading
Development can involve becoming less responsive to a distinction as well as becoming more capable. Werker and Tees examine changes in speech-sound discrimination across the first year. The study gives readers a concrete problem in explaining how experience and changing performance are related.
Before you read
A phonetic contrast distinguishes speech sounds; languages differ in which contrasts distinguish words. A conditioned head turn is a learned response to a sound change, reinforced by a visual event. Cross-sectional comparisons involve different infants, while longitudinal comparisons follow the same infants over time.
Read for
- Identify the speech contrasts, language backgrounds, and age groups. Which comparisons separate a general difficulty with the task from difficulty with a particular contrast?
- Compare the cross-sectional findings with the small longitudinal series. What does repeating the task with the same infants add?
- Distinguish a decline in measured discrimination from an irreversible loss of sensory capacity. Which interpretation is established by the design?
Consider afterwards
- Older infants perform less well on one contrast but still succeed on a familiar-language contrast. Propose an exposure study that could distinguish experience-dependent tuning from an inflexible maturational deadline.
Editorial context
The study helped establish perceptual reorganization as a developmental question. Its particular contrasts, small samples, and behavioral criterion do not establish that every nonnative distinction disappears at one age. The later Kuhl, Tsao, and Liu experiment shows that a particular exposure arrangement can affect phonetic discrimination near the end of the first year. Neither result provides a universal deadline for learning another language. The DOI here identifies the 1984 original, not its later reprint.