Language-specific listening

Languages differ in their phonological structure and psycholinguists have begun to explore the consequences of this fact for speech perception. We review research documenting that listeners attune their perceptual processes finely to exploit the phonological regularities of their native language. As a consequence, these perceptual processes are ill-adapted to listening to languages that do not display such regularities. Thus, not only do late language-learners have trouble speaking a second language, also they do not hear it as native speakers do; worse, they apply their native language listening procedures which may actually interfere with successful processing of the non-native input. We also present data from studies on infants showing that the initial attuning occurs early in life; very young infants are sensitive to the relevant phonological regularities which distinguish different languages, and quickly distinguish the native language of their environment from languages with different regularities.