Constructing adequate non‐speech analogues: what is special about speech anyway?

Vouloumanos and Werker (2007 ) claim that human neonates have a (possibly innate) bias to listen to speech based on a preference for natural speech utterances over sine‐wave analogues. We argue that this bias more likely arises from the strikingly different saliency of voice melody in the two kinds of sounds, a bias that has already been shown to be learned pre‐natally. Possible avenues of research to address this crucial issue are proposed, based on a consideration of the distinctive acoustic properties of speech.