Speech sound categories – the key to language development

The project is examining how young children learn speech sound categories, which form the basis for much of language development.

Speech sound categories enable us to recognize a given speech sound even though, acoustically, it may sound very different when produced by different speakers. Development of these speech sounds lays the foundations for large parts of subsequent language development. It is therefore important to identify the perceptual processes, i.e. the processes governing how impressions are received and processed, that are involved when these categories are formed, and hence the conditions in the surroundings and the child that must be met in order for the speech sound category to develop.

The aim of the project is to help explain how early speech sound categories are formed, thereby adding to our understanding of early language development in children and human language ability as a whole.