Auditory perception in the child.

The development of auditory perception in the infant starts in utero and continues up to the age of 9-10 years. We shall examine the various stages, the various acoustic parameters and the segmental level. Three stages are important: from 7 months onwards: first perceptual reorganization; between 7 and 12 months: second perceptual reorganization; from 10 to 24 months: segmentation of the spoken word. We will note the evolution between 2 and 6 years and between 6 and 9 years: 9 years being the critical age--switching from global treatment to analytic treatment of utterances. We will then examine musical perception and we note that at the prelinguistic level it is the same perceptive units that handle verbal sequences and musical sequences. The stages of musical perception are parallel to those for speech. Bigand posed the question: "should we see in these hierarchies, and in their importance to perception, the manifestation of an overall cognitive constraint restricting the handling of long sequences of acoustic events (including language) and why not even for all processes dealing with symbolic information".