Strategies for perception of mother tongue: from born to one year old

ABSTRACT Very young babies show very refined language skills being able to perceive many features in adult speech. The perception of the mother tongue is therefore essential to language acquisition. This literature review deals with speech perception skills of children less than one year of age. Therefore, a literature search was performed in 7 databases, in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish, in the period of 2003-2014. From this bibliographic research it was possible to recognize how language acquisition occurs quickly, and that very young infants are able to use elaborate strategies to initiate such acquisition.