Infant artificial language learning and language acquisition

The rapidity with which children acquire language is one of the mysteries o f human cognition. A view held widely for the past 30 years is that childre n master language by means of a language-specific learning device. An earli er proposal, which has generated renewed interest, is that children make us e of domain-general. associative learning mechanisms. However, our current lack of knowledge of the actual reaming mechanisms involved during infancy makes it difficult to determine the relative contributions of innate and ac quired knowledge. A recent approach to studying this problem exposes infant s to artificial languages and assesses the resulting learning. In this arti cle, we review studies using this paradigm that have led to a number of exc iting discoveries regarding the learning mechanisms available during infanc y. These studies raise important issues with respect to whether such mechan isms are general or specific to language, the extent to which they reflect statistical learning versus symbol manipulation, and the extent to which su ck mechanisms change with development. The fine-grained characterizations o f infant learning mechanisms that this approach permits should result in a better understanding of the relative contributions of, and the dynamic betw een, innate and learned factors in language acquisition.