{"doi":"10.31234/osf.io/njm3r","title":"The acquisition of speech categories: Beyond perceptual narrowing, beyond unsupervised learning and beyond infancy.","abstract":"An early achievement in language acquisition is carving up a variable acoustic space into linguistic categories. The canonical story is that infants accomplish this in the first years, when there are few avenues for learning other than unsupervised statistical learning. This review synthesizes psychological, phonetic and computational results that challenge this view. First, unsupervised learning may be insufficient given the statistics of speech (including infant directed speech). Second, the evidence that infants “have” speech categories is not unambiguous. Third, error-driven/discriminative learning can help even in unsupervised learning environments. Fourth, implicit supervisory signals are available to older infants. Finally, development is protracted through adolescence, enabling richer avenues for development. Thus, infancy may be a time of organizing the auditory space with true categorization arising in a complex developmental cascade later in life. This has implications for critical periods, second language acquisition, and our basic framing of the problem of speech perception.","journal":"PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)","year":2022,"id":297467,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":9,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9561,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":230969,"name":"Bob McMurray","orcid":"0000-0002-6532-284X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":176,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:31:26.161109Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}