Professor Denis Burnham
Ph.D in Psychology, Monash University
Professor of Psychology and Director of MARCS
Auditory Laboratories
University of Western Sydney

Seminar

Infants’ universal perception of the speech sounds of the world's languages becomes tuned to their specific language environment over four stages - phonetic, phonemic, semantic, and orthographic. These four stages can be viewed as functionally adaptive periods of re-organization during which new modes of representation are cumulatively added. Using this framework, studies of auditory speech perception development for consonants and vowels will be presented to elucidate relationships between speech perception and language acquisition. From this base, new research on the perception of lexical tone will be presented in order to broaden the view and identify lacunae in speech perception development research, and approach a comprehensive model of speech perception and language acquisition.