Abstract
Children appear to acquire new words effortlessly from complex auditory input. However, this process is highly intricate, requiring the simultaneous integration of phonetic and phonemic details, prosodic cues, and grammatical structures. Furthermore, different components of a language's sound system-such as phonemes, syllables, and prosodic features-appear with different frequencies in the input and follow distinct patterns of distribution in speech. This article reviews research that illustrates how infants' growing understanding of their native language sound system facilitates their acquisition of new words.