How Babies and Young Children Learn to Understand Language

How children learn language has long been of interest to those concerned with its evolution. The idea that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ has been promoted, which means the stages of child development on their way to adulthood replicate those of our human ancestors on their way to becoming modern humans. This idea has been applied to language acquisition and its evolution, but I’ve never been persuaded. It is intellectually problematic because our human ancestors were never ‘on their way’ to anywhere other than being themselves. My interest in language acquisition is different and twofold. First, is language acquired by specialized mental processes that are dedicated to this task or learned by general-purpose processes used for a variety of learning tasks? Second, can we project the processes of language acquisition/learning that we observe in the present into the prehistoric past to gain insights about the evolution of language? Infants a mere three days old prefer listening to the rhythm of their caregivers’ language. Learning words Let’s remind ourselves of the problem that language learners face. When we write, we leave spaces between words. Readingwordswithoutsuchspacesisdifficult. When we speak, however, our words flow from one to another without any pauses, generating a continuous stream of sound. Yet we hear and understand each word without difficulty—we automatically ‘parse’ the utterances we hear into their component parts. We can do this because we know not only the words and grammar of our language, but also its prosody—how syllables at the start or end of words are stressed and how pauses are used between phrases. Without any awareness of such knowledge, we use it effortlessly both when speaking and when listening; we use it to identify words as they appear within the continuous stream of sound we hear, just as if the words had been written down interspersed with spaces. One can appreciate this with a little reflection. Just think how you pronounce the syllable ham when referring to a piece of meat and when talking about a fury animal—a long ham and a short ham -ster. Think about listening to a language unknown to you, […]

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