“…Children acquire speech categories during infancy in a way that can be described as perceptual narrowing (Kuhl et al, 2005;Werker & Curtin, 2005;Werker & Yeung, 2005), thought to be undergirded by a form of unsupervised statistical learning (Maye et al, 2003). However, I argue here that this theory was built on an understanding of the basic nature of speech perception that turned out to be wrong (categorical perception, Liberman et al, 1957), and which enabled an inappropriately rich interpretation of infant methods (Feldman et al, 2021). More importantly, computational modeling suggests a much richer range of potential mechanisms (Nixon & Tomaschek, 2020) and more recent empirical work dramatically alters our understanding of the ecology of the learning environment (Feldman, Myers, et al, 2013;Teinonen et al, 2008) the developmental progression (Hazan & Barrett, 2000;McMurray et al, 2018).…”