Abstract: Development of speech perception profoundly influences individual’s language learning. In the first year of life, infants’ speech perception undergoes a drastic change under the influence of native language experience, which reveals the change from initial universal speech perception to the native specific perception. Statistical learning theory was proposed to address the underlying mechanisms of infants’ speech perception and its development. That is, infants in the language environment are very sensitive to the frequency distribution of the phonetic variation in the speech, and they can distinguish native phonetic units from the acoustic continuum by calculating the statistical distribution. Meanwhile, functional reorganization and some social cues also play an important role in the development of infants’ speech perception.

Key words: infant, speech perception, statistical learning mechanism, functional reorganization, social interaction