Sensorimotor foundations of speech perception in infancy

Published on June 10, 2023

Human learners uniquely have the ability to spontaneously learn the structure of their native language (or languages), including sounds, words, and grammar. The capacity to learn speech is biologically endowed and human infants are born with a speech-ready brain [1,2]. One facet of this preparedness is a perceptual system that is sensitive to the sensory features of speech sounds at birth, including multimodal features that co-occur when making those sounds. There is an intrinsic link between the sounds of speech and the articulatory movements that produce those sounds [3–5], and this link between perceptual and motor control processes is relevant from early development to adulthood [6].

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