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Leonid Mamchenkov If you have had any extended experience with an infant, you are aware that communication occurs before anything like formal language emerges. In the pre-language stage of development, infants vary their cries for different purposes, they smile, they reach, they make eye contact, they make language-like sounds. But researchers have discovered that babies also exhibit more specific language behaviors. It has been observed, for example, that infants as young as three days can identify and show a preference for their own mother’s voices over other female voices (Stoel-Gammon & Menn 1997, p. 84). It has also been observed that infants demonstrate the ability to distinguish between very similar phonetic sounds, such as [p] and [b]. What is even more interesting is that they appear to distinguish between sounds that may not be separate phonemes in their own language but could be in another language. Experiments suggest that by the age of six months, babies begin to align their discrimination of sounds with the phonemes of their own language. That is, they begin to perceive sounds as “different” or “the same” in the same way that adult speakers of the language would.
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