Something Old, Something New: Combining Mechanisms During Language Acquisition

Infants face the paramount task of learning a language. Here, I review recent literature on two separate topics that suggest they use a combination of both evolutionarily old and new cognitive tools to face this task. Research on the principles that guide how humans and nonhuman animals group sequen...

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Published inCurrent directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society Vol. 25; no. 2; pp. 130 - 134
Main Author Toro, Juan M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.04.2016
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Animal cognition
Information processing
Language acquisition
Language instruction
Linguistics
Syntax
Teaching methods
comparative cognition
speech perception
perceptual bias
phonology
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Summary:Infants face the paramount task of learning a language. Here, I review recent literature on two separate topics that suggest they use a combination of both evolutionarily old and new cognitive tools to face this task. Research on the principles that guide how humans and nonhuman animals group sequences of sounds has shown that we share with other species perceptual biases that we apply to linguistic stimuli. On the contrary, research on processing differences between consonants and vowels suggests humans, but not other animals, benefit from a "division of labor" across phonological representations. This division would help to extract regularities from the speech signal and facilitate language learning. The studies reviewed here provide support for the idea that perceptual biases together with language-specific representations guide the discovery of linguistic structures.
ISSN:0963-7214
1467-8721
DOI:10.1177/0963721416629645