From “Signal to Syntax”: But What Is the Nature of the Signal?

The human infant comes to the task of language learning with a number of advantages. First, as research over the past thirty years has indicated, infants possess strong abilities to discriminate a wide array of phonetic contrasts. Further, as separate lines of investigation over the same time period have discovered, the natural form of input directed to language learning children appears to be modified in ways that should logically facilitate children’s attempts to construct initial mappings for language.