Fossil Markers of Language Development: Phonological ‘Deafnesses’ in Adult Speech Processing

Abstract Recent research has demonstrated that language acquisition begins at a very early age and proceeds at an amazingly fast pace. During the first year of life, infants find out important parts of the phonological structure of their maternal language and begin to recognize and store frequent words. One crucial question for models oflanguage acquisition concerns the mechanisms underlying these developments. The names of the authors are in alphabetic order. Research for this chapter was supported by a Fyssen grant to the second author. We would like to thank Leticia Maria Sicuro Correa, Anne Christophe, Frarn;:ois Dell, Jacques Mehler, Marina Nespor, and Franck Ramus for comments and discussion.