Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code

@article{Kuhl2004EarlyLA,
  title={Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code},
  author={Patricia K. Kuhl},
  journal={Nature Reviews Neuroscience},
  year={2004},
  volume={5},
  pages={831-843}
}
  • P. Kuhl
  • Published 1 November 2004
  • Linguistics
  • Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Infants learn language with remarkable speed, but how they do it remains a mystery. New data show that infants use computational strategies to detect the statistical and prosodic patterns in language input, and that this leads to the discovery of phonemes and words. Social interaction with another human being affects speech learning in a way that resembles communicative learning in songbirds. The brain's commitment to the statistical and prosodic patterns that are experienced early in life… 
View on Nature
biology.kenyon.edu
1,758 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
137
Background Citations
1,040
Methods Citations
47
Results Citations
48

1,758 Citations

CRACKING THE SPEECH CODE : EARLY PHONETIC PERCEPTION SHOWS HOW INFANTS LEARN LANGUAGE
The acquisition of language and speech looks deceptively simple. Young children learn to speak rapidly and effortlessly, from babbling at 6 months of age to full sentences by the age of 3, and follow…
Infant speech perception bootstraps word learning
Learning the sound system of Japanese: What does it tell us about language acquisition?
TLDR
Data from Japanese are presented to exemplify the phonological characteristics of Japanese; acquisition of mora-timed rhythm, edge-prominent prosody, lexical pitch-accent and segmental distribution.
Acquiring sounds and meaning jointly in early word learning
TLDR
This dissertation developed a computational model of joint form and meaning acquisition, capable of learning from a corpus of natural speech, and tested the cognitive plausibility of this model with adult subjects.
Social Mechanisms in Early Language Acquisition: Understanding Integrated Brain Systems Supporting Language
TLDR
It is argued that the assertion that social factors gate language learning explains not only how typically developing children acquire language but also why children with autism exhibit twin deficits in social cognition and language.
Learning words and learning sounds: Advances in language development.
  • M. Vihman
  • Linguistics
    British journal of psychology
  • 2017
TLDR
Evidence from production is reviewed and how the implicit and explicit learning mechanisms assumed by the complementary memory systems model might be understood as reconciling the two approaches are considered.
Language acquisition and speech rhythm patterns: an auditory neuroscience perspective
  • U. Goswami
  • Psychology
    Royal Society Open Science
  • 2022
All human infants acquire language, but their brains do not know which language/s to prepare for. This observation suggests that there are fundamental components of the speech signal that contribute…
Gateway to Language: The Perception of Prosody at Birth
The surprising ease and efficiency with which human infants, but not kittens or young chimps, acquire language has puzzled scholar for decades. We now have a relatively good empirical and theoretical…
Neural substrates of language acquisition.
TLDR
Developmental neuroscience studies using language are beginning to answer questions about the origins of humans' language faculty, and individual continuity in linguistic development from infants' earliest responses to phonemes is reflected in infants' language abilities in the second and third year of life.
Implicit statistical learning and language acquisition: Experience-dependent constraints on learning
TLDR
This chapter reviews recent behavioral and neurophysiological findings from the research group that illuminate the relation of this type of ‘implicit statistical learning’ (ISL) to language acquisition, and shows modality constraints affecting the operation of ISL mechanisms.
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 198 REFERENCES
Pattern induction by infant language learners.
TLDR
9-month-old infants were given the opportunity to induce specific phonological patterns in 3 experiments in which syllable structure, consonant voicing position, and segmental position were manipulated and revealed that infants rapidly extracted new phonological regularities.
Development of language-specific phoneme representations in the infant brain
TLDR
Here it is demonstrated the development of language-specific 'memory traces' in the brains of the same group of infants between six months and one year of age.
A new view of language acquisition.
  • P. Kuhl
  • Linguistics
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
  • 2000
TLDR
A new theoretical position has emerged, and six postulates of this position are described, which suggest that infants' strategies are unexpected and unpredicted by historical views.
Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants.
TLDR
The findings show that language input to infants provides exceptionally well-specified information about the linguistic units that form the building blocks for words.
Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants
TLDR
The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds.
Statistical Language Learning: Mechanisms and Constraints Learning the Sounds of Words Statistical Learning and Syntax
guage, it seems improbable that children could ever discern its structure. The process of acquiring such a system is likely to be nearly as complex as the system itself, so it is not surprising that…
Infant artificial language learning and language acquisition
Brain responses reveal the learning of foreign language phonemes.
TLDR
The present study demonstrates the dynamic nature of cortical memory representations for phonemes in adults by using the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential to study Hungarian and Finnish subjects and finds that the MMN for a contrast between two Finnish phoneme was elicited in the fluent Hungarians but not in the naive Hungarians.
Infant-Directed Speech Facilitates Word Segmentation.
TLDR
The experiments reported here suggest that infant-directed speech facilitates word segmentation and may be useful for other aspects of language acquisition as well.
Human speech and birdsong: Communication and the social brain
  • P. Kuhl
  • Psychology
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
  • 2003
TLDR
A comparison of the ontogeny of communicative repertoires in human infants and avian song birds shows striking parallels, providing support for yet another fascinating link between communicative development in babies and birds.
...
...