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Since the day we are born we are introduced to speech and language. When we are around 1 or 2 years of age we being to talk. Did you ever stop and think how we really learn how to talk and learn language? People, might think they have an answer to this question. They might answer it yea, your parents thought us how to talk. Those people are right in some ways. My quote from Meyers is from chapter 3 where he states “children are active thinkers, constantly to construct more advanced understandings of the world.” In this paper I’ll be discussion the following topics: sensitivity to consonants and vowels, what do infants know about words, and recognizing word forms. You might be thinking why would a college student want to write a paper about the way infants speaks. This is because I have a 2-year-old daughter who is a year behind in her speech process.

Infants are born with a remarkable sensitivity to the world’s languages. Newborns start life with the sensitivity to cues that will signify different elements of speech. Within the fist few hours and days of life, infants are able to tell apart excerpts from different language families. At 7 days of age, an infant can distinguish his/her mother’s voice from another women’s voice. Then at 2 weeks an infant can distinguish her father’s voice from another man’s voice. When he/she is at the 3 months of age they can make a vowel sounds. At the age of 4 months an infant raised in a monolingual setting may be able to make out their native language from a very similar unknown language.

When an infant reaches age 6-8 months they can not only separate positively native phonetic contrast, they can also single out phonetic contrasts involving syllable that are not used to decide meaning in their native language. By the end of the first year of life, an infant’s phonetic perceptual sensitivities are a sign of large of influence from the native language....