The contrastive hierarchy in phonology 2009 Dresher.pdf - CUNY ...

Czech or Inslekampx phonemes unless they are Czech or Inslekampx
babies. Babies make this transition before they produce or
understand words... They must be sorting the sounds directly,
somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the
phonemes used in their language. The module can then serve as the
front end of the system that learns words and grammar. [emphasis
added]
On the face of it, it is hard to see how infants can acquire phonemes
without knowing if two utterances are the ‘same’ or ‘different’ (Bloomfield 1933).
It has been argued that learners are particularly attentive to the distribution of
sounds, and can draw certain conclusions about whether a cluster of sounds are
to be assigned to one category or to more than one, even in the absence of
vocabulary or meaning (Maye 2000, Maye, Werker and Gerken 2002, Weiss and
Maye in press). However, distribution can only take one so far. In fact, there is no
evidence that infants have acquired phonemes by the age of one. The source for
Pinker’s claims is the following passage by Kuhl et al. (1992: 608):
Infants demonstrate a capacity to learn simply by being exposed to
language during the first half year of life, before the time that they
have uttered meaningful words. By 6 months of age, linguistic
experience has resulted in language-specific phonetic prototypes that
assist infants in organizing speech sounds into categories. They are
in place when infants begin to acquire word meanings toward the
end of the first year. Phonetic prototypes would thus appear to be
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