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What Infants Know and What They have to Learn about Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Jacques Mehler ,
Marina Nespor  and
Marcela Peña
Jacques Mehler*
Affiliation:
International School for Advanced Science, Trieste, Italy and Emeritus CNRS, France
Marina Nespor
Affiliation:
University of Milan, Bicocca and Interdisciplinary Center, Accademia dei Lincei, Italy
Marcela Peña
Affiliation:
Universidad de, Chile and International School for Advanced Science, Trieste, Italy
*
E-mail: mehler@sissa.it
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Abstract

The study of language acquisition during the first year of life is reviewed. We identified three areas that have contributed to our understanding of how the infant copes with linguistic signals to attain the most basic properties of its native language. Distributional properties present in the incoming utterances may allow infants to extract word candidates in the speech stream as shown in the impoverished conditions of artificial grammar studies. This procedure is important because it would work well for most natural languages. We also highlight another important mechanism that allows infants to induce structure from very scarce data. In fact, humans tend to project structural conjectures after being presented with only a few utterances. Finally, we illustrate constraints on processing that derive from perceptual and memory functions that arose much earlier during the evolutionary history of the species. We conclude that all of these machanisms are important for the infants to gain access to its native language.

Type
Focus: The Origin of Language
Information
European Review , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 2008 , pp. 429 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2008

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