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Abstract
In our study newborn infants were presented with lists of lexical and grammatical
words prepared from natural maternal speech. The results show that newborns are able
to categorically discriminate these sets of words based on a constellation of perceptual
cues that distinguish them. This general ability to detect and categorically discriminate
sets of words on the basis of multiple acoustic and phonological cues may provide
a perceptual base that can help older infants bootstrap into the acquisition of grammatical
categories and syntactic structure.