How Babies Learn to Listen

In the first months of their lives, babies face the challenging task of learning the sounds of their language.

They appear to succeed in this task effortlessly, mastering the sound inventory of their language before their first birthday.

However, this task is not easy because babies encounter a lot of variability in the language that they hear (e.g., different talkers, different languages, different accents). Here we study how babies learn about the sounds that are relevant for their native language or languages in the first months of their life.