Acquiring a native language involves learning about its phonetic elements and the constraints on their ordering. Our study explored this issue by examining infants′ listening preferences for unfamiliar words that either observe or violate native language phonetic and phonotactic patterns. American 9-month-olds, but not 6-month-olds, listened significantly longer to words with English, rather than Dutch, sound patterns. Dutch 9-month-olds showed the opposite pattern of preferences. No preferences occurred for low-pass-filtered versions of the words, suggesting that infants were responding to phonetic and phonotactic properties rather than to prosodic ones. However, when words fundamentally differed in their prosodic organization (e.g., English vs Norwegian), even American 6-month-olds listened significantly longer to English words.
