Preverbal infants are particularly good at discriminating syllables that differ by a single phoneme but do they perceive syllables as a whole unit or can they become aware of the underlying phonemes if their attention is attracted to the relevant level of analysis? We trained 3-month-old infants to pair two consonants, co-articulated with different vowels, with two visual shapes. Using event-related potentials, we showed that infants generalize the learned associations to new syllables with respect to the training phase. The systematic pairing of a visual label with a phonetic category is rapidly learned in a few trials, suggesting that phonemes are natural categories for infants but also that phonetic representations are accessible to internal operations outside the linguistic system. Hence, the possibility of an explicit access to the phonetic level, which is the main process underlying alphabetic reading system, is grounded in the early faculties of the human infant.

Preverbal 婴儿特别擅长区分单个音素不同的音节，但他们是否将音节视为一个整体，或者如果他们的注意力被吸引到相关的分析水平，他们能否意识到潜在的音素？我们训练 3 个月大的婴儿将两个辅音配对，辅音与不同的元音共同发音，具有两种视觉形状。使用事件相关电位，我们表明婴儿在训练阶段将学习到的关联概括为新的音节。视觉标签与语音类别的系统配对在一些试验中很快就学会了，这表明音素是婴儿的自然类别，而且语音表示可以被语言系统之外的内部操作访问。因此，