Language Acquisition in Infants

The unknown has always puzzled the human brain. When marvelous scientific technologies were unavailable to solve the mystery of human intelligence, scientists made numerous guesses as to which processes might underlie the smooth and complex functioning of the brain; modern technologies made it possible to look inside the human scalp and start decoding Nature’s most complex creation – the human mind. Language is an extremely essential attribute of human beings, which distinguishes them from the rest of the animals. However, its mystery started to be unwound only recently.

How humans acquire ability to separate and construct words is one of the central questions of the modern research in the field of language acquisition. It has been proposed that to construct words, human infants use sequential probabilities; that is, they are innate mathematicians and use simple statistics to perceptually categorize particular sound groups, calculate their frequency in the ambient stream of sounds, and predict which group of sound should follow the certain other one.

For example, Japanese, Swedish, and English infants (i.e., representatives of different types of languages) demonstrate increased sensitivity to the phonemes and prototype vowels specific to their language, and do not respond as highly when hearing phonemes and vowels pertaining to languages, other than their native one. The experiment on eight-months-old infants also showed that when discriminating a change from a particular syllabus to another one in the string of syllabi (i.e., “de” to “ti”), infants who succeed the most are the ones who learn a pattern of syllabi in the sequence (i.e., perceive combinations of certain syllabi as words) by learning that the sequential probability of a certain syllabi given a certain other syllable is one; that is, the syllable will undoubtedly occur.