Summarize milestones in the development of touch, taste, smell, and hearing that are present at birth and during the first half of the first year

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At birth, newborns respond to touch and pain. They can distinguish the shape of an object placed in their palm. Newborns can also distinguish sweet, sour, and bitter tastes; they prefer sweetness. Newborns can distinguish odors; they prefer those of sweet-tasting foods. They also prefer the smell of their own mother's amniotic fluid and the lactating breast. With regard to hearing, newborns can distinguish some sound patterns. They prefer complex sounds to pure tones, prefer listening to their own mother's voice over an unfamiliar woman's voice, and prefer listening to their native language over a foreign language. Newborns can make subtle distinctions between almost all speech sounds, including sounds not found in their own language. They turn their eyes and head in the general direction of a sound.
During the first half of the first year, infants frequently engage in exploratory mouthing of objects. They prefer a salty taste to plain water and readily change their taste preferences through experience. With regard to hearing, infants prefer listening to human speech over structurally similar nonspeech sounds and can identify the location of a sound more precisely than at birth. By age 6 months, infants become sensitive to syllable stress patterns in their own language. They can organize sounds into increasingly elaborate patterns, such as musical phrases.