“…Several studies have used phonetic transcription by trained listeners to examine the relative frequencies of occurrence of a range of consonants (e.g., /b/, /d/, /g/, /n/, /m/) in the recorded babbling of infants being raised in English, French, Swedish, Japanese and Mandarin language environments, and have found language-specific distributional differences by 10–13 month olds (de Boysson-Bardies, Sagart & Bacri, 1981; de Boysson-Bardies & Vihman, 1991; de Boysson-Bardies, Vihman, Roug-Hellichius, Durand, Landberg, & Arao, 1992; Levitt & Aydelott Utman, 1992; Chen & Kent, 2010; Levitt & Wang, 1991). Moreover, a recent acoustic examination of VOTs in the syllable-initial stops of infants from two language environments found native language-consistent differences in proportion of pre-voiced stops produced by French vs. English infants at 9 months (Whalen, Levitt, & Goldstein, 2007).…”