ABSTRACT
For many years, the issue of how the infant extracts the relevant syntactic units from the speech signal was not seriously addressed in language acquisition research. Instead, most studies of language acquisition assumed that the input was already segmented into discrete words and proceeded from that point to investigate how the infant arrived at the syntactic organization that characterizes the native language. However, as investigators struggled with how the infant eventually discovers the organization that works for his or her native language, it became apparent that one should no longer overlook the possibility that the speech signal might actually provide some cues to the underlying syntactic organization.
