Thirty Years of Research on Infant Speech Perception: The Legacy of Peter W. Jusczyk

Abstract

The field of infant speech perception emerged in the early 1970s as new techniques became available to assess young infants' sophisticated discriminative capacities. Peter W. Jusczyk, who died in 2001, was involved in the first studies of infant speech perception and became over the next 30 years the most prolific and influential contributor to research on language acquisition. We review his many contributions and comment on their impact in addressing four key aspects of early language development: discrimination of speech segments; prosody and its role in language development; effects on perception of frequent segments and sequences; and early word-form perception, segmentation, and learning.