Abstract
Whether human language is a rule-based mental knowledge system has been debated since Chomsky’s proposal half a century ago. Today, most theories concur that adult native speakers possess a rule-based representation of their native language’s grammar, but it is still heatedly debated whether this rule system is in place already in the initial state, i.e., innate, or whether it emerges during development. This chapter reviews a series of behavioral and brain imaging experiments with newborns and young infants in an attempt to address this question. These studies chart the developmental trajectory of repetition-based structural regularities, and they suggest that the ability to represent at least this simple form of structural rule in an abstract way is present at birth. The implications of these results for theories of language and language learning as well as remaining questions are discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
As NIRS is a relatively new technique in developmental cognitive neuroscience, we ran a behavioral validation study (Gervain et al., 2011) using the classical high-amplitude sucking procedure to make sure that the absence of a differential response for ABA vs. ABC was not simply due to the low sensitivity of the NIRS measure. The behavioral results confirmed the NIRS findings: newborns can discriminate between ABB vs. ABC, but not between ABA vs. ABC grammars.
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Gervain, J. (2014). Early Rule-Learning Ability and Language Acquisition. In: Lowenthal, F., Lefebvre, L. (eds) Language and Recursion. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9414-0_7
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