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Native listeners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2002

ANNE CUTLER
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and University of Nijmegen, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. E-mail: anne.cutler@mpi.nl

Abstract

Becoming a native listener is the necessary precursor to becoming a native speaker. Babies in the first year of life undertake a remarkable amount of work; by the time they begin to speak, they have perceptually mastered the phonological repertoire and phoneme co-occurrence probabilities of the native language, and they can locate familiar word-forms in novel continuous-speech contexts. The skills acquired at this early stage form a necessary part of adult listening. However, the same native listening skills also underlie problems in listening to a late-acquired non-native language, accounting for why in such a case listening (an innate ability) is sometimes paradoxically more difficult than, for instance, reading (a learned ability).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2001

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