ABSTRACT
Because multilingual environments are the norm rather than the exception, infants must have the capacity very early in life to distinguish one language from another. Without such a capacity, infants might acquire linguistic systems that amalgamate properties of different languages. The ensuing confusion would be overpowering. Fortunately, this never arises, despite the intuitive fears of monolingual parents. Infants raised in multilingual societies do not become dysphasic. Nor do children who learn more than one language at once pay a high price in terms of time or effort. These informal observations constitute one of the central mysteries that psycholinguists are faced with. Although the striking efficiency of the Language Acquisition Device has been acknowledged, little attention has focused on how its phonological and prosodic components are implemented. In this chapter, we review some of the adult and infant work that has begun to explore this area of research. We present evidence gathered over the last fifteen years shifting from results observed in adults to those observed with infants. The research strategy that looks both at the initial and stable states of the mind is part of an approach that is ideally suited for psycholinguistics.
