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Additional evidence of newborn’s innate preparedness for language learning comes from
extensive investigation of monolingual children’s perception of segmental features of human
language. It has long been known that adults perceive consonantal contrasts that are phonemic in
their native language categorically – that is to say, acoustic variations within a certain range of
each consonant are all perceived as the same phoneme (e.g. /la/ vs /ra/). It is believed that
categorical perception of the consonantal segments that make up human languages reflects the
hardwiring of the auditory system and its sensitivity to specific acoustic ranges. Precursors to
categorical perception have been demonstrated in pre-verbal monolingual infants. Of particular
relevance to the issue of bilingual acquisition, during the first 6 to 8 months of life, pre-verbal
infants can discriminate most of the phonetic contrasts that all languages make use of (Jusczyk,
1985) whether these contrasts are in the input the infants are exposed to or not. By 10 months,
infants continue to discriminate contrasts that occur in their native language, but no longer
discriminate non-native contrasts .
162 Bilingualism: Beyond Basic Principles
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