Читать книгу Infants and Children in Context - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 233

The capacity to hear develops in the womb; in fact, hearing is the most well-developed sense at birth. Newborns are able to hear about as well as adults (Northern & Downs, 2014). Shortly after birth, neonates can discriminate among sounds, such as tones (Hernandez-Pavon, Sosa, Lutter, Maier, & Wakai, 2008). By 3 days of age, infants will turn their head and eyes in the general direction of a sound, and this ability to localize sound improves over the first 6 months (Clifton, Rochat, Robin, & Berthier, 1994; Litovsky & Ashmead, 1997).

As we will discuss in Chapter 5, the process of learning language begins at birth, through listening. Newborns are attentive to voices and can detect their mothers’ voices. Newborns only 1 day old prefer to hear speech sounds over similar-sounding nonspeech sounds (May, Gervain, Carreiras, & Werker, 2018). Newborns can perceive and discriminate nearly all sounds in human languages, but from birth, they prefer to hear their native language (Kisilevsky, 2016). Brain activity in the temporal and left frontal cortex in response to auditory stimuli indicates that newborns can discriminate speech patterns, such as differences in cadence among languages, suggesting an early developing neurological specialization for language (Gervain, Macagno, Cogoi, Peña, & Mehler, 2008; Gervain & Mehler, 2010).