Speech Processing Development in Infants: A Longitudinal ERP Study of Native and Nonnative Consonant Discrimination

Robust neural signatures of perceptual attunement for consonants may be more subtle, later-emerging, or stimulus-specific than commonly assumed. The dissociation between stable amplitude and migrating generators suggests that spatial location may be as important as response magnitude for characterizing auditory maturation during early infancy. Practically, equivalent neural responses to native and nonnative consonant contrasts should not be interpreted as evidence of atypical development; rather, indices of general auditory maturation may be more reliable markers of healthy development during the first year.