The young universal listener is an established concept in psycholinguistics. However, it is unclear what abilities universal perception entails and at what age it exists. This article aims to motivate rethinking about what it means to be a universal listener. Early and recent studies on infant speech acquisition are reviewed, considered in the light of cross‐language variation and adult performance, and finally linked to the current understanding of fetal hearing and learning. It turns out that language‐universal perception is best described as an auditory‐based perception rather than an ability to perceptually categorize the sounds of any possible language. Interestingly, at birth infants might no longer listen in a language‐universal mode because learning from the ambient speech signal begins at least several weeks before birth. Future studies need to answer the remaining questions concerning the point in perinatal development at which speech perception begins to take on language‐specific traits and for which sounds.

中文翻译：

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普遍感知的时间和内容：早期语音采集的回顾

年轻的普遍听众是心理语言学的既定概念。但是，尚不清楚普遍感知具有什么能力以及它在什么年龄存在。本文旨在激发人们重新思考成为通用侦听器的含义。本文回顾了有关婴儿语音习得的早期和最新研究，并根据跨语言变异和成人表现来加以考虑，最后将其与当前对胎儿听力和学习的理解联系起来。事实证明，将语言通用感知最好描述为基于听觉的感知，而不是将任何可能语言的声音进行感知分类的能力。有趣的是，在出生时，婴儿可能不再以通用语言聆听，因为从周围的语音信号中学习至少要在出生​​前几周开始。