J. Mehler
2010
Annual review of psychology 61:191--218, 2010
During the first year of life, infants pass important milestones in language development. We review some of the experimental evidence concerning these milestones in the domains of speech perception, phonological development, word learning, morphosyntactic ...
2008
Cognitive science 32(6):1021--1036, 2008
Abstract An important topic in the evolution of language is the kinds of grammars that can be computed by humans and other animals. Fitch and Hauser (F&H; 2004) approached this question by assessing the ability of different species to learn 2 grammars,(AB) n and A n B ...
2000
Science 288(5464):349-351, 2000
Humans, but no other animal, make meaningful use of spoken language. What is unclear, however, is whether this capacity depends on a unique constellation of perceptual and neurobiological mechanisms or whether a subset of such mechanisms is shared with other organisms. To explore ...MORE ⇓
Humans, but no other animal, make meaningful use of spoken language. What is unclear, however, is whether this capacity depends on a unique constellation of perceptual and neurobiological mechanisms or whether a subset of such mechanisms is shared with other organisms. To explore this problem, parallel experiments were conducted on human newborns and cotton-top tamarin monkeys to assess their ability to discriminate unfamiliar languages. A habituation-dishabituation procedure was used to show that human newborns and tamarins can discriminate sentences from Dutch and Japanese but not if the sentences are played backward. Moreover, the cues for discrimination are not present in backward speech. This suggests that the human newborns' tuning to certain properties of speech relies on general processes of the primate auditory system.