Innate phonetic boundaries revisited (L)

Nittrouer [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 110, 1598-1605 (2001)] raised several serious concerns with the so-called Universal Theory of phonetic category development that she characterized as the accepted wisdom in the field of infant speech perception. She then presented data from infants and children that were claimed to be inconsistent with Universal Theory and led her to question the entire notion of phonetic categories. Here we argue that Nittrouer not only misrepresented Universal Theory, but also provided no data to refute either this theory or the existence of phonetic categories. (C) 2002 Acoustical Society of America.