Mehler, Jusczyk, Lambertz, Halsted, Bertoncini, and Amiel-Tison (1988)
MEHLER, Jacques, Peter Jusczyk, Ghislaine Lambertz, Nilofar Halsted, Josiane Bertoncini, and Claudine Amiel-Tison. “A Precursor of Language Acquisition in Young Infants.” Cognition 29 (1988): 143-78.
A series of studies were done on four-day-old French and 2-month-old American infants. Both groups were able to distinguish between utterances in the native speech of the mother, and speech utterances from another language. Follow up studies indicated that these infants were not likewise able to distinguish between the utterances of two foreign languages. Further experiments were conducted with filtered speech, such that the segmental features were no longer clearly present. These final experiments indicate that infants might possibly use prosodic cues to classify utterances as either native or non-native speech.
