t, imprinting was not observed to occur. If the critical period passed without the necessary stimulation, the behavior would never be acquired.Speech perceptionBabies appear to be well-equipped to recognize speech in the sense that they have an innate or very early learned ability to recognize speech sounds or phonemes. Different languages have different phonemes and a phonemic distinction in one language may not occur in another language, even one that is closely related. There appears to be a crtical period for setting the boundaries of phonemes and once they have been set in one way as a child, it is very difficult as an adult to master a different set of phonemes that draws distinctions in a way that is incompatible with the first language. For example, /r/ and /l/ are different phonemes in English, but not in Japanese, which is why Japanese people who learn English as adults have great difficulty in hearing the differences between the two. LanguageBabies very rapidly learn the phonemes of the language that they hear. Indeed, they have no difficulty in learning the phonemes for two or more different languages if they are being reared in a multilingual family. The ability to hear the differences between phonemes is not restricted at birth to the language that the child hears at home. Japanese babies can hear the difference between /r/ /l/ even though monolingual Japanese adults find this difference very difficult to detect. But the language that the baby hears soon starts to have an influence because, by about 8 months, babies begin to show a marked decrease in their ability to distinguish between phonemes that are not present in the language that they hear around them. ConclusionWhat the developing child apparently needs is a stable and continuous development in relation to its mother or mother-surrogate. The stability and continuity must be prolonged, and not too much or too often interrupted. Deprivation leads to isola...
