Speech Perception and Language Acquisition in the First ... · Speech Perception and Language...

ANRV398-PS61-08 ARI 28 October 2009 19:11

Speech Perception andLanguage Acquisitionin the First Year of LifeJudit Gervain1 and Jacques Mehler2

1Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver British Columbia,V6T 1Z4, Canada2Neuroscience Sector, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati,Trieste 31014, Italy; email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2010. 61:191–218

First published online as a Review in Advance onSeptember 28, 2009

The Annual Review of Psychology is online atpsych.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100408

Copyright c© 2010 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0066-4308/10/0110-0191$20.00

Key Words

infancy, learning mechanisms, phonological bootstrapping, evolutionof language

AbstractDuring the first year of life, infants pass important milestones in lan-guage development. We review some of the experimental evidence con-cerning these milestones in the domains of speech perception, phono-logical development, word learning, morphosyntactic acquisition, andbilingualism, emphasizing their interactions. We discuss them in thecontext of their biological underpinnings, introducing the most recentadvances not only in language development, but also in neighboringareas such as genetics and the comparative research on animal commu-nication systems. We argue for a theory of language acquisition that in-tegrates behavioral, cognitive, neural, and evolutionary considerationsand proposes to unify previously opposing theoretical stances, such asstatistical learning, rule-based nativist accounts, and perceptual learningtheories.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192THEORETICAL APPROACHES . . . . 193

Nativist Approachesto Language Acquisition. . . . . . . . . 193

Perceptual Primitivesin Language Acquisition. . . . . . . . . 195

Statistical Approachesto Language Acquisition. . . . . . . . . 195

EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS ANDBIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS:APES, BIRDS, AND HUMANS . . . 196Genetic Studies of Speech

Production and Language . . . . . . . 197Similarities Between Birdsong

and Human Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197Does a New Computational

Component Cause theEmergence of Languagein the Human Brain? . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

THE EARLY SENSITIVITY TOSPEECH AND SUBSEQUENTPHONOLOGICALDEVELOPMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200Acquisition of the Native

Phonology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201The Early Sensitivity to Rhythm and

Its Potential BootstrappingRole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202

THE WORD SEGMENTATIONPROBLEM: LEARNINGMECHANISMS ANDPERCEPTUAL PRIMITIVES . . . . 203Statistically Based Word

Segmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204Perceptual and Linguistic

Constraints on StatisticalLearning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

Language-Specific Cuesto Segmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

The Interaction of Statistical andLanguage-Specific Cues . . . . . . . . . 206

Early Form-Meaning Associations . . 206BROAD LEXICAL CATEGORIES:

FUNCTORS AND CONTENTWORDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

WORD ORDER AND OTHERTYPOLOGICALDIFFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

THE NEURAL CORRELATESOF LANGUAGE IN YOUNGINFANTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

INTRODUCTION

The emergence of language has intrigued sci-entists and the general public alike, but it wasonly in the second half of the twentieth centurythat a systematic empirical investigation of lan-guage acquisition began. This work was greatlyinspired by the suggestion that the environmentis mainly a trigger rather than a tutor for lan-guage acquisition, at least during the first yearsof life (Chomsky 1959). Consequently, to ex-plain the uniquely human capacity of language,scholars proposed innate acquisition mecha-nisms, specific to language (Chomsky 1959).A few years later, research into the biologi-cal foundations of language was expanded, giv-ing a better grasp of the innate dispositions

for language acquisition (Lenneberg 1967). Bycontrast, other researchers suggested that clas-sical learning mechanisms, ones that humansshare with other animals, may be sufficientto acquire language (Elman 1996, Tomasello2000). Under this view, the human specificityof language arises from quantitative rather thanqualitative differences between the species.

Some of these theoretical questions maybe resolved by studying preverbal infants, inparticular newborns, as this allows us to deter-mine how much of our language acquisitionabilities are due to dispositions detectablemuch before the surroundings have shapedour cognitive apparatus. Therefore, our reviewmostly focuses on the development of language

192 Gervain · Mehler

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and its underlying mechanisms during the firstyear of life. This choice is also justified by thegrowing body of research and recent advancesin understanding how different mechanisms,such as statistical and distributional learning,rule extraction, as well as perceptual andmemory constraints, work together duringlanguage development.

Our review discusses landmarks in languageacquisition as well as their biological underpin-nings. We focus on studies that connect brain,mind, and behavior. We believe that buildingbridges between these different levels is the wayof the future and that the next decades will seethe success of such integrative methodology andtheory building.

In the review, we first describe the differ-ent theoretical approaches to language acqui-sition. We then review the increasingly impor-tant and fast-growing body of literature on thebiological foundations of human language, fo-cusing mostly on genetic and evolutionary as-pects. Then we review the empirical evidencethat has accumulated over the past decades insupport of the theories and approaches intro-duced. We discuss the findings following thelevels of organization in language from phonol-ogy through word segmentation and lexical ac-quisition to grammar. Finally, we consider someof the novel empirical findings that relate to theneural basis of language acquisition and pro-cessing in newborns and young infants. Build-ing on these empirical findings, we argue foran integrative theory of language acquisition,proposing that rule learning, perceptual boot-strapping, and statistical learning all contributeto different levels of language acquisition, andthat the most interesting objective is to under-stand their interactions and the division of laboramong them.

THEORETICAL APPROACHES

Language acquisition came to the forefrontof cognitive and developmental research whenNoam Chomsky (1957, 1959) pointed outthat acquiring language poses a serious learn-ing problem. Infants never receive explicit

information about the structure of the gram-mar that generated the utterances they areexposed to. In the absence of structural infor-mation, the finite data set that infants receive asinput is compatible with an infinite number ofunderlying rules or grammars—a challenge tolearning known in philosophy and mathematicsas the induction problem.

The most important theoretical approachesto language acquisition in the past 50 years haveinvestigated this logical problem, proposing so-lutions to it or denying its existence.

Nativist Approachesto Language Acquisition

Language cannot be learned exclusively fromthe input, yet young infants seem to acquireit with remarkable ease. Therefore, Chomsky(1959) argued that the acquisition process hasto be guided by innate knowledge. This log-ical argument gave rise to a nativist theoret-ical approach to language acquisition as wellas a large body of related empirical research(for a representative summary, see Guasti 2002).This view capitalizes on the observation that al-though they are superficially different from oneanother, languages of the world share a largenumber of structural characteristics; for exam-ple, they all use lexical categories like functors(small grammatical words, such as he, it, on, of,this) and content words (e.g., nouns and verbsthat carry lexical meaning, such as flower, ta-ble, run, sing). Under the nativist view, the uni-versal features of language design are part ofour species’ biological endowment and are en-coded in the language faculty as innate princi-ples. By contrast, aspects of language structurethat vary (e.g., the relative order of verbs andobjects or whether a language allows pronom-inal subjects to be dropped) are assumed to beencoded by parameters, i.e., mental switchesthat implement all the universal options [e.g.,a verb-object (VO) order and an OV order; li-censing pronoun-drop or not].

This account assumed that infants are ableto detect and extract abstract regularities fromthe input. Indeed, Marcus et al. (1999) showed

www.annualreviews.org • Speech Perception and Language Acquisition in the First Year of Life 193

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that 7-month-old infants are able to learn ab-stract, algebraic generalizations. In their study,infants were familiarized with an artificial gram-mar encoding an identity-based regularity (e.g.,ABB: wo fe fe). In the test phase, babies showedlonger looking times for items that were in-consistent with the grammar of familiarization(e.g., ABA) than for items that were consistentwith it, indicating that they extracted the un-derlying regularity.

Under the principles and parameters view,language acquisition is mediated by settingthe parameters to the values that characterizethe native language. For instance, an English-learning infant will have to set the word-orderparameter to VO, e.g., eat an apple, and the pro-drop parameter to negative, e.g., It is raining,but not ∗Is raining, while a Japanese infant willset both parameters to the opposite value, e.g.,ringo-wo taberu ‘apple.accusative eat’ “eat an ap-ple” and futte iru ‘raining is’ “(it) is raining.”However, parameters are defined over abstractlinguistic entities such as verbs, nouns, and pro-nouns, so the infant still faces the problem oflinking these abstract mental representationsto actual physical entities in the speech signal(Pinker 1984).

One solution proposed to the linking prob-lem is the use of bootstrapping mechanisms.These are heuristic learning mechanisms thatexploit the universal correlations that exist be-tween perceptually available, surface charac-teristics of a language and its abstract mor-phosyntactic properties. Three types of surfacecues have been proposed to act as triggers forbootstrapping.

One approach (e.g., Pinker 1984) suggeststhat the relevant cue is of semantic/conceptualnature. By understanding the general mean-ing of some simple sentences and by knowingthe meaning of some words, typically nouns,the infant can construct syntactic trees, givenconfigurational universals, such as the phrasestructure suggested by generative grammar orother linguistic theories, which are believed tobe part of the innate language faculty. Fromthese trees, the child can derive the syntac-tic rules of her mother tongue, which in turn

help her parse and understand more complexsentences.

A second approach (e.g., Gleitman &Landau 1994) claims that the already acquiredpieces of syntactic knowledge help bootstrapthe rest of syntax. The initial (productive) lex-icon of the child contains a large number ofnouns. This allows the infant to track the posi-tion of nouns within sentences. With this infor-mation, infants can learn the type and argumentstructure of verbs. In English, for instance, in-transitive verbs have one noun (phrase) (NP)preceding them, transitive action verbs haveone NP preceding and one following them,mental verbs have one NP preceding them and aclause following them, and so forth. Thus, uponencountering a sentence containing an initialNP and a final NP with a verb between them,the verb can be categorized as transitive.

It is important to note that these two ap-proaches build on already acquired linguisticknowledge. But how are these initial pieces ac-quired? A third approach, the one we are explor-ing here, suggests that morphosyntactic proper-ties are signaled by their acoustic/phonologicalcorrelates (Mehler et al. 2004; Morgan &Demuth 1996; Nespor et al. 1996, 2008). AsMorgan & Demuth (1996, p. 2) put it: “[T]heseaccounts propose that information available inspeech may contain clues to certain fundamen-tal syntactic distinctions [. . .].” This approach,unlike the other two, assumes no prior lin-guistic knowledge on the part of the learnerand thus may explain the earliest acquisitions.Nouns and verbs, for instance, are abstractlexical categories. However, in English, nounsoften bear stress on the first syllable (recordN: ) and verbs on the last (recordV: ) (Cutler & Carter 1987, Davis& Kelly 1997). The stress pattern, then, can actas a cue to the two categories. Although this isspecific to English, there seem to be phonolog-ical and prosodic cues that might signal syntac-tic properties universally (Mehler et al. 2004;Morgan & Demuth 1996; Nespor et al. 1996,2008). An important focus of our review, there-fore, is not only to characterize how infants per-ceive and learn about the acoustic, phonetic,


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and phonological aspects of language, but alsoto explore how these might bootstrap the be-ginnings of morphosyntax during the first yearof life.

Perceptual Primitivesin Language Acquisition

How the acoustic and phonological aspects ofspeech are related to underlying structure hasreceived increasing attention recently. Accord-ing to a recent proposal by Endress et al. (2009),language might recruit previously existing per-ceptual mechanisms or “primitives” and usetheir outputs to feed abstract linguistic com-putations. In the perception and memory lit-erature, for instance, it has long been knownthat sequence edges are particularly salient po-sitions, facilitating perception, learning, and re-call of elements in those positions (see En-dress et al. 2009 for a summary). This, the au-thors argue, might be related to why languagesshow a universal preference for word-initialand word-final morphosyntactic processes asopposed to word-internal ones; e.g., prefixingand suffixing are common among languages,whereas infixing is very rare. Indeed, Endresset al. (2005) have recently demonstrated thatadult learners perform well in an artificial gram-mar learning task if the regularity that they needto learn (identical adjacent repetition of sylla-bles) is at the edge of a syllable sequence, butthey fail if the same regularity appears sequenceinternally.

Similarly, as Endress et al. (2007) havedemonstrated, identical repetitions are per-ceived automatically as salient Gestalts by adultlearners in artificial grammar paradigms. Whenparticipants’ task was to learn a sequence ofthree tones where the second and third toneswere identical, they succeeded. But they failedwhen the tone sequences implemented an or-dinal regularity, for example, a high tone fol-lowed by a low tone followed by a middle tone.Repetitions or identity appears to be a spe-cial input configuration that is more readilyperceived than are other relations of the samemathematical complexity, for example, ordinalrelations.

In the following sections, we review howsome perceptual primitives, for example, thedetection of repetitions (Endress et al. 2005,2007; Gervain et al. 2008a), edge salience(Endress et al. 2005, 2007), or prosodic group-ing principles (Nespor et al. 2008), might helpbootstrap the acquisition of morphosyntacticstructure.

Statistical Approachesto Language Acquisition

Although the above described nativist positionhas been very influential in the past 50 years, thelong tradition of empiricist approaches to lan-guage acquisition has re-emerged in the pasttwo decades. These empiricist positions takedifferent forms, from statistical learning ap-proaches to connectionism (Elman et al. 1996);what they share, though, is a belief that no in-nate language-specific knowledge is requiredto explain language acquisition. Rather, lan-guage development is a piecemeal learning pro-cess that relies on general-purpose mechanisms,typically statistical in nature, shared by mostperceptual and cognitive domains. No innatemental contents specific to language such aslexical categories, principles, or parameters areassumed.

These statistical learning approaches gainednew momentum in the language-acquisition lit-erature when Saffran et al. (1996) demonstratedthat very young infants are able to use statisticalinformation contained in speech and to then usesuch information to segment continuous speechinto its constituent words. These initial resultshave given rise to a large body of research, partlyreviewed in The Word Segmentation Problemsection below, investigating the role, scope, andlimitations of statistical learning in language ac-quisition.

These statistical accounts have also beencombined with social learning theory. InTomasello’s (2000) account, infants begin bylearning frequently occurring sequences in theinput (e.g., Where is the toy? Where is the cup?This is a ball. This is a dog.). As a secondstep, infants discover similarities among thesememorized sequences and extract semiabstract


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constructions or templates with a memorizedcomponent and one variable element (Whereis the ? This is a .). In these templates, thevariable elements are not variables in a mathe-matical sense, as their scope might be limitedto an arbitrary set of elements, for example,the members of the family, animals, or cars.Abstract, adult-like linguistic knowledge is be-lieved to emerge only later, as young childrengeneralize further, using the semiabstract tem-plates. In Tomasello’s (2000) view, infants andyoung children are aided by their social learningabilities during the stepwise abstraction pro-cess. They understand and construct the mean-ing of utterances not solely on the basis of thesemantics of the linguistic constituents in theutterances addressed to them, but also by in-ferring the possible meaning from the speaker’sintention, which even very young infants havebeen shown to have access to (Csibra & Gergely2009, Gergely & Csibra 2003, Onishi &Baillargeon 2005).

Our review takes an integrative stance, em-phasizing that innate language-specific, percep-tual, and statistical mechanisms are all necessaryfor language acquisition. What needs to be ex-plored is their respective roles and the interac-tions between them.

EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS ANDBIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS:APES, BIRDS, AND HUMANS

The nativist position on language acquisitiongrounded language in human biology. The ini-tial investigations focused on the neurobiologyof language, citing critical period effects, lan-guage acquisition in congenitally blind and deafchildren, neurally based language pathologies,etc. (see Lenneberg 1967 for a classical formu-lation). More recently, in an attempt to inves-tigate the most fundamental questions aboutlanguage, numerous papers have explored itsevolution. In parallel, studies of nonhuman ani-mals are proceeding in the hope of determiningwhether human abilities have arisen in the hu-man mind as a patchwork of different precursorsystems that were present in ancestral species.

This line of research is of particular rele-vance for language acquisition because it raisesconvergent theoretical questions about innate,genetically endowed language abilities. If a pre-disposition for language is innate in humans,it became part of our genetic heritage dur-ing evolution. Therefore, research into nonhu-man species’ cognitive and communicative abil-ities complements studies of early infancy. Suchcomparative research also sheds light on the is-sue of language specificity. If humans and non-human animals share cognitive and/or learn-ing abilities, these cannot be language specificsince only our species has language. However,they may have been precursors bringing hu-mans closer to language.

Research comparing human (infant) lan-guage acquisition and nonhuman cognitive,perceptual, and learning abilities usually takesone of two routes. Traditionally, humans’ capa-bilities were compared to those of their closestevolutionary relatives, primates. Indeed, com-parative studies between infants and primateshave shown that the latter are also capable ofstatistical learning (Newport et al. 2004), lan-guage discrimination on the basis of rhythm(Ramus et al. 2000), and categorical phonemeperception (Morse et al. 1987), among otherabilities. More recently, birdsong has been ex-plored as a possible analogy for human lan-guage. This may, at first, appear surprising,since songbirds are not closely related to hu-mans. However, vocal communication, like hu-man language, plays an important role in song-birds’ cognitive as well as social development,which is not the case for nonhuman primates.Songbirds’ sophisticated vocalization systemthus allows us to investigate not only learningand cognitive abilities underlying language asan abstract system, but also the mechanismsinvolved in vocalization, i.e., the relationshipbetween perception and production. In addi-tion, birdsong is highly complex, which allowsa better comparison with human language thanstructurally simpler primate calls do. To quotePrather et al. (2009), “all songbirds studied todate [. . .] learn their song notes by imitation, afeature of human speech that is otherwise rare


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among animals [. . .]. Swamp sparrows’ songscomprise repeated groups of 2–5 ‘notes’, whichare composed of short pure-tonal frequencysweeps, with note categories differing primar-ily in duration, bandwidth and rate of change infrequency.”

Below we show the relevance of birdsongas a comparative model of speech, if notnecessarily of language. Investigating birdsongfrom this perspective gives us the opportu-nity to dissociate evolutionary ancestry fromadaptive pressures. Phylogenetically differentvocal communication systems might havedeveloped similar mechanisms not becauseof common ancestry, but as a response tosimilar environmental and adaptive pressures.Comparing human language to birdsongmakes it possible to explore the componentsof human language that are the result of selec-tion and those that arose through hereditaryendowment.

Genetic Studies of Speech Productionand Language

Mutations in FOXP2 cause speech, morpho-logical, and in all likelihood, other language dis-orders (Gopnik & Crago 1991, Haesler et al.2007, Marler & Peters 1981). Haesler et al.(2007) began to study whether birds also pos-sess behaviors and neural structures related toFOXP2 mutations after patients suffering fromspeech dyspraxia were found to have functionalabnormalities related to high levels of FOXP2in the striatum and basal ganglia. They rea-soned that if birds also had problems relatedto elevated levels of FOXP2, then it would bepossible to use birds as a model to understandwhether the genetic underpinnings of speechwere similar to those of birdsongs. The au-thors used zebra finches because they learn theirsongs by “imitating” adult tutors and becausethey change songs seasonally. Haesler et al.(2007) noticed that the expression of FOXP2tends to increase in Area X when zebra fincheslearn to sing. The levels of FOXP2 decreasebefore the birds begin to learn their songs.The authors experimentally lowered the level

of FOXP2 in Area X during song learningand found that the experimental birds with de-creased levels of FOXP2 sing in atypical waysas compared with controls. This study sug-gests that songbirds have mechanisms for learn-ing their songs that are reminiscent of humanslearning to speak and are susceptible to mu-tations in FOXP2. Since these findings, sev-eral other experiments have enriched our un-derstanding of the expression of the geneticendowment and learning abilities (e.g., Milleret al. 2008).

Similarities Between Birdsongand Human Speech

The similarities of some mechanisms observedin songbirds and humans are indeed quitestriking. Birdsong and human speech mightuse similar brain mechanisms: Auditory brainareas responsible for perception and motor ar-eas responsible for production might be closelylinked in both systems with single neuronsresponding to both perceived and producedvocalizations. For humans, the motor theory ofspeech, linking perception and production, wasproposed decades ago (Liberman et al. 1967).More recently, Prather et al. (2008) identifiedsimilar mechanisms in swamp sparrows. Thebrain area HVC (high vocal center) of maleswamp sparrows is engaged during song pro-duction, song perception, and learning of songsfrom tutors. Prather et al. (2008) investigatedwhether HVC neurons display both types ofactivity by recording from this area in freely be-having male swamp sparrows during presenta-tion as well as production of songs. The authorsfound that some HVC neurons were active dur-ing singing and listening, which, as the authorsdemonstrated, was due to a motor estimation ofauditory feedback. To confirm that this activityis indeed motor in nature and not simply due toauditory feedback as the bird perceives its ownsong, the authors played different distractingsongs to birds while they were singing, soauditory feedback was disrupted. Increasedneural activity was observed despite this ma-nipulation. This, as the authors suggest, bears


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resemblance to the motor theory of speechperception (Liberman et al. 1967) as well as tothe mirror neuron system in the frontal cortexof monkeys (Gallese et al. 1996, Rizzolatti et al.2001).

Birdsong has been suggested as a potentialanalog for speech and/or language due to itscomplex structure. In birdsong, just like in hu-man language, the origin of this structural com-plexity, whether it is genetically determined orlearned, is an exciting question. Feher et al.(2009) have asked whether species-typical songscan be created de novo in zebra finches, muchlike language can emerge in groups of linguis-tic isolates in the span of a few generations(Senghas et al. 2004). Feher et al. (2009) stud-ied juvenile birds, raised in isolation. Songs thatare usually observed in isolated (ISO) birds areless structured, noisier, and contain high-pitchupsweeps, making it possible to quantify the dif-ferences observed between the wild-type (WT)and ISO type of songs. Each juvenile bird wastrained by a particular ISO tutor in a sound-proof cage. A number of isolated birds servedas individual tutors to teach juveniles who hadbeen deprived of prior exposure. Pupils of thefirst generation become tutors for other juve-nile isolates, an operation that went on until thefourth generation was reached. Changes wereobserved in each successive training stage fromthe first to the fourth generation. The data showthat the WT and ISO songs differ in their spec-tral features and duration of the acoustic state ofsongs, but across generations there is a progres-sion from the ISO toward the WT song prop-erties. The authors claim that “song culture isthe result of an extended developmental pro-cess, a ‘multigenerational’ phenotype partly ge-netically encoded in a founding population andpartly in environmental variables, but takingmultiple generations to emerge.” These find-ings bear strong resemblance to language emer-gence de novo in that more structured and morespecies-typical song and language emerge as aresult of the acquisition/learning process, sug-gesting that impoverished input is sufficient totrigger the genetically encoded mechanisms re-sponsible for song/speech.

The above reviewed evidence indicates thatsimilarities between birdsong and speech existat the level of neural mechanisms as well as interms of the underlying genetic bases. But isbirdsong a good model for the core propertyof human language, namely its structural com-plexity? Gardner et al. (2005) looked at canaries(Serinus canaria), which produce hierarchicallyorganized songs. Songs consist of “syllables,”which, when repeated, form a “phrase.” Suchphrases appear in young canaries after 60 dayswhen they are raised typically, that is, in a pop-ulation of singing adults. It is known that deaf-ened juveniles produce the species-specific hi-erarchical organization, although syllables andphrases are impoverished. Gardner et al. (2005)exposed isolated juveniles to synthesized songsthat were “ungrammatical” because they im-plemented a “random walk” through the syl-lable space. Initially, the production of the iso-lates seemed congruent with the random walkexposure. Upon transition to adulthood, how-ever, normal syllables became recognizable andprimitive phrasing started to emerge. At theend of the learning process, juveniles producedstandard syllables, and species-typical phrasingwas clearly noticeable. The authors concludedthat “imitation and innate song constraints areseparate processes that can be segregated intime: freedom in youth, rules in adulthood.”

Gentner et al. (2000) and Prather et al.(2009) further examined song organization andperception in birds, focusing on categorical per-ception (for a discussion of categorical percep-tion in humans, see The Early Sensitivity toSpeech and Subsequent Phonological Devel-opment section). In the latter study, the au-thors systematically manipulated note duration,a learned aspect of swan sparrow song, andfound that sensorimotor neurons showed a cat-egorical response to gradually varying note du-ration. This neural response coincided withcategory boundaries observed behaviorally inthe animals. Furthermore, sparrows comingfrom song dialects exhibiting different cate-gorical boundaries responded according to theboundaries of their own species, indicating thatboundaries were indeed learned.


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In sum, it appears that birdsong and humanspeech are comparable in terms of their under-lying neural mechanisms, the presence of innateguiding principles as well as some of their orga-nizational properties. This, of course, does notimply that birdsong is equivalent to human lan-guage in terms of its productivity and structuralcomplexity. Nor does it mean that songbirds’cognitive abilities are more similar to thoseof humans than are the cognitive abilities ofprimate species. Comparisons with birdsongprovide us with an optimal testing ground toexplore the genetic ancestry as well as the adap-tive pressures that have shaped human languageduring the evolution of our species.

These similarities notwithstanding, humanlanguage appears to have a unique productivityand computational power not paralleled in anyother species. Where do these features origi-nate? After reviewing the abilities and mech-anisms shared by humans and other animals,we turn to those that might be unique to ourspecies.

Does a New ComputationalComponent Cause the Emergence ofLanguage in the Human Brain?

In an influential paper, Hauser et al. (2002)proposed that enquiries into language evolu-tion should be incorporated into theories oflanguage. They suggested that it may be con-venient to distinguish between two aspects ofthe human language faculty: the language fac-ulty in the broad sense (FLB) and the languagefaculty in the narrow sense (FLN). Their pro-posal is that the FLB is composed of various ele-ments such as sensory motor systems, memorysystems, social abilities, and so forth, whereasthe FLN comprises a very limited number ofcomputational components or a single com-putational component, which the authors viewas quite likely to have been sufficient for theemergence of language. A similar conclusionhas been drawn by other researchers with re-spect to mathematical abilities. “The humanspecies is unique in its capacity to create rev-olutionary cultural inventions such as writing

and mathematics, which dramatically enhanceits native competence. From a neurobiologi-cal standpoint, such inventions are too recentfor natural selection to have dedicated spe-cific brain mechanisms to them. It has there-fore been suggested that they co-opt or ‘recy-cle’ evolutionarily older circuits with a relatedfunction [. . .], thus enriching (without neces-sarily replacing) their domain of use” (Knopset al. 2009, p. 1538).

This way of presenting the theoreticalframework proposes that many components(use of the vocal tract, categorical perception,etc.) are present in other animals. For a de-tailed discussion of which phonological abilitiesmight be found in nonhuman species, see Yip(2006). The computational abilities requiredto acquire the syntax of the native language,by contrast, are unique to humans. Hauseret al. (2002) framed their paper as “a quest forthe crucial evolutionary step that allowed ourspecies to acquire the complex syntax of humanlanguages.”

In a follow-up experimental paper, Fitch& Hauser (2004) and Saffran et al. (2008)proposed that recursion, responsible fordiscrete infinity, might be the one and uniquecomponent of FLN. This proposal generateda great number of experiments and theoreticaldebates seeking to support or infirm theconjecture (Bahlman et al. 2006, Fitch et al.2005, Friederici et al. 2006, Hauser et al. 2002,Hochmann et al. 2008, Pinker & Jackendoff2005). Fitch & Hauser (2004) based theirstudies on the complexity of grammars thatChomsky (1957 and subsequent work) pro-posed. Chomsky made the claim that humanlanguages are best characterized as context-free or phrase-structure grammars (PSG), notas computationally more limited finite-stategrammars (FSG). Fitch & Hauser (2004) reportan experiment investigating whether humansand monkeys are similar in their abilities tolearn a FSG and a PSG from the simple pre-sentation of items derived from the grammars.The authors used two artificial grammars.The FSG had items conforming to structure(AB)n with n ≤3, the PSG to structure AnBn


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with n ≤3. The authors habituated humansand cotton-top tamarin monkeys to either ofthese items. As and Bs were consonant-vowelsyllables, with a female voice pronouncing theA syllables and a male the B syllables. In thetest phase, humans had to rate new items ascongruent or incongruent with the grammarthey had learned, whereas monkeys weretested with a head-turn procedure to estimatewhether the underlying grammar had been ex-tracted. Humans behaved as if they had learnedboth grammars and monkeys as if they had thecapacity to extract only the FSG grammar.

Later, Gentner et al. (2006) studied Euro-pean starlings and challenged the notion thatonly humans can learn PSG. They used thesame kinds of grammars as had Fitch & Hauser(2004), except that As and Bs corresponded totwo specific categories of sounds these birds use.Before being tested, birds were trained witha protracted operant-conditioning schedule, aprocedure that Fitch & Hauser (2004) did notuse with the cotton-top tamarins. After thisextended training phase, starlings learned thePSG.

Perruchet & Rey (2005) criticized Fitch &Hauser (2004) on different grounds, arguingthat in Fitch & Hauser’s (2004) study, humansdid not actually need to establish nonadjacentdependencies to succeed and cannot thereforebe assumed to have extracted the underlyingstructure of the An Bn items. Indeed, the distri-butional properties and/or the rhythmic prop-erties of Fitch & Hauser’s (2004) material of-fer a better explanation of how humans pro-cessed the AnBn items. Indeed, Hochmann et al.(2008) showed that human participants in thetest did not dismiss A2B3 or A3B2 as incongru-ent with the grammar AnBn. Moreover, wheninterrogated at the end of the experiment, thosefew participants who did dismiss such items re-ported that they explicitly counted the num-ber of As and Bs and only accepted sequenceswith equal numbers. Despite these empirical is-sues, the theoretical proposal made by Hauseret al. (2002) remains highly interesting and in-vites further research.

We follow this brief review of the evolu-tionary aspects of human language and animals’abilities with a detailed discussion of young in-fants’ speech and language-processing capaci-ties to provide an empirical basis for the evalu-ation of the theoretical and evolutionary claimsintroduced so far.

THE EARLY SENSITIVITY TOSPEECH AND SUBSEQUENTPHONOLOGICALDEVELOPMENT

Newborn infants show surprising speech-processing abilities from birth. They preferforward-going speech and primate vocaliza-tions over acoustically matched nonspeechsounds or backward speech (Dehaene-Lambertz et al. 2002; Pena et al. 2003;Vouloumanos & Werker 2004, 2007), theirmother’s voice over other female voices (Mehleret al. 1978), and their native language over un-familiar languages (Mehler et al. 1988, Moonet al. 1993). These early language discrimi-nation abilities might represent some form ofimprinting to the properties of the native lan-guage upon the first encounter immediately af-ter birth, or alternatively the result of exposureto the maternal language in utero. Newbornscan make most of the phonemic distinctionsattested in the world’s languages (Dehaene-Lambertz & Dehaene 1994, Eimas et al. 1971,Werker & Tees 1984b), and they are able to dis-tinguish languages they have never heard beforeon the basis of their rhythmical characteristics(Mehler et al. 1988; Nazzi et al. 1998; Ramuset al. 1999, 2000). Newborns are also able todetect the acoustic cues that signal word bound-aries (Christophe et al. 1994), discriminatewords with different patterns of lexical stress(Sansavini et al. 1997), and distinguish functionwords (e.g., it, this, in, of, these, some) fromcontent words (e.g., baby, table, eat, slowly, happy)on the basis of their different acoustic charac-teristics (Shi et al. 1999). These early, innateabilities lay the foundations for later languagelearning.


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Acquisition of the Native Phonology

One of the most fundamental and at the sametime most surprising perceptual abilities ofnewborns is that they are able to discriminatemost sound contrasts used in the world’slanguages. In other words, they are born as“citizens of the world,” ready to learn anynatural language. Just like adults, newbornsperceive these sounds categorically (Eimaset al. 1971, Liberman et al. 1957), perceivingacoustic variation from within a phonemeboundary as the same sound and the sameacoustic variation spanning adult phonemeboundaries as being different sounds.

During the first year of life, as a result ofexposure to the native language, this initialuniversal discrimination narrows down to thephonemes, that is, minimal meaningful differ-ences (e.g., pin versus bin), of the native lan-guage (Werker & Tees 1984a). Discriminationof most nonnative contrasts is lost (Werker &Tees 1984a), whereas it is maintained or evenenhanced for native contrasts (Kuhl et al. 2006).English, for instance, only has a dental /d/sound, whereas Hindi discriminates betweena retroflex /D/ and a dental /d/. Newbornsand young infants born into English-speakingenvironments readily discriminate the Hindisounds. But after eight months of exposure toEnglish, where the two categories are not dis-tinguished, English-learning infants start losingthe discrimination (Werker & Tees 1984a). In-deed, English-speaking adults find it very hardto discriminate this contrast. Hindi infants andadults, as a result of exposure to Hindi, maintainit.

What learning mechanism might accountfor this learning-by-forgetting (Mehler 1974,Mehler & Dupoux 1994) or perceptual attune-ment (Scott et al. 2007) process? It has beensuggested that native phonological categoriesmight be established through a distributionallearning mechanism (Maye et al. 2002). In alanguage like English, where there is only one/d/ sound, most actual realizations that infantsencounter will cluster around a prototypical

/d/ pronunciation, so the distribution ofEnglish /d/ sounds will have a mode aroundthe most typical acoustic parameters for /d/.On the other hand, in Hindi, where there aretwo /d/ sounds, the same acoustic space willshow a bimodal distribution, as there will bemany instances around the typical /D/ soundas well as around the typical /d/ sound. As aresult, in English, infants will be exposed to aunimodal distribution, and in Hindi, a bimodalone. It has been shown that infants are sensitiveto this statistical distribution, and they createa single phoneme category when exposed to aunimodal distribution, whereas they establishtwo categories if the distribution in the input isbimodal (Maye et al. 2002). In their study, Mayeand colleagues (2002) used the /da/-/ta/ contin-uum, where the two syllables are distinguishedby the onset of voicing (voice onset time, orVOT). Since /d/ is a voiced consonant, in /da/,voicing starts at 0 msec, that is, immediately atthe onset of the syllable, whereas in /ta/, theconsonant is voiceless; thus, voicing starts onlyat the onset of the vowel. By delaying VOTincrementally, a continuum was created from/da/ with VOT at 0 msec through six syllableswith VOT at 20 msec, 40 msec, etc., to /ta/ withVOT at 140 msec. One group of 6- to 8-month-old infants, the unimodal group, was exposed toa frequency distribution along this continuumwhere syllables in the middle (instances 4 and 5with VOT 60 msec and 80 msec, respectively)had the highest frequency of occurrence. A sec-ond group, the bimodal group, was exposed toa distribution where tokens closer to the endpoints (with VOT 20 msec and 120 msec) werethe most frequent ones. When tested on thediscrimination of the end points of the contin-uum, /da/ and /ta/, the bimodal group showedbetter discrimination than the unimodal group(Maye et al. 2002).

These results suggest that infants have theability to track the frequency of sound tokensin the input and might use this informationto tune into native phonemic categories (Best& McRoberts 2003, Kuhl 2004, Maye et al.2002).


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The Early Sensitivity to Rhythm andIts Potential Bootstrapping Role

The previous sections have illustrated the chal-lenge of acquiring one’s native language. How-ever, some infants successfully acquire not onlyone, but two or more languages at the sametime. How do these infants discriminate be-tween their languages?

Linguists have long recognized that lan-guages differ perceptibly in their sound patternsand, in particular, in their rhythm (Abercrombie1967, James 1940, Ladefoged 1993, Pike 1945).Initially, these differences were described as cat-egorical and were derived from the isochronyprinciple, that is, as a function of the linguis-tic unit that has a constant duration in a givenlanguage. According to this view, languages fallinto one of three rhythmic classes. In stress-timed languages such as English, Dutch, orPolish, the isochronous unit is the time betweentwo subsequent stressed syllables. For exam-ple, in the sentence Pronunciation is importantin English, the duration of time between thestressed syllables (in bold) is roughly the same.In syllable-timed languages, such as Spanishor Italian, the unit of isochrony is the sylla-ble, that is, syllables are roughly of equal du-ration. For instance, in tavolo ‘table’ (Italian),no vowel is reduced, so all syllables are of thesame length. In mora-timed languages, suchas Japanese or Tamil, the isochronous unit isthe mora. The mora is the measure of syllableweight [light/short syllables such as a (the in-definite article) consist of one mora; heavy/longsyllables such as see consist of two morae].

These differences in rhythm are intuitiveand easy to perceive for adults. If infants havethe same sensitivity to linguistic rhythm, itmight help them discriminate their languages,at least when those are from different rhythmi-cal classes. Such an early sensitivity was indeedobserved by Mehler et al. (1988), who showedthat newborns were able to discriminate theirfuture native language from a rhythmicallydifferent language, even if both were low-pass filtered, suppressing phoneme identity.This initial finding, suggesting that language

discrimination relies upon suprasegmental,rhythmical cues, was extended by Nazzi et al.(1998), showing that rhythmical differenceswere sufficient for discrimination; familiaritywith the languages was not necessary. Theseauthors found that French newborns readilydiscriminated between low-pass filtered utter-ances in English and Japanese, two languagesthey had never heard before.

These results established that rhythm mightserve as an initial cue to language discrimi-nation. However, the exact acoustic featurescorresponding to the subjective percept ofrhythm were still unknown. The isochronyprinciple proved incorrect, as empirical investi-gations obtained no isochrony for the relevantunits (Dauer 1983), and several languageswere found that showed characteristics ofboth stress-timed and syllable-timed rhythm(Nespor 1990). Rhythmicity thus appeared tobe a gradient rather than a categorical property(Nespor 1990). Building on these observations,Ramus et al. (1999) proposed an operationaldefinition for rhythm and rhythmical classifica-tion as a function of three acoustic parameters:(a) %V, the proportion of vowels/vocalic spacerelative to the total length of an utterance,(b) �V, the variability in the length of vocalicspaces, and (c) �C, the variability in the lengthof consonant clusters. The authors measuredthese parameters in naturalistic recordingsof speech in eight languages (e.g., English,Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese) and foundthat languages clustered into groups similar tothe traditional rhythmical classes when plottedin two-dimensional spaces defined by any twoof the three acoustic parameters. This defini-tion recreated the traditional classification andaccounted for languages previously found tobe ambiguous (Nespor 1990) with respect toclassification or currently undergoing change,because continuous rather than categoricalmeasures were used. It is important to notethat work by Grabe & Low (2002), also usinga computational definition of rhythm, failedto recreate the traditional rhythmic classes.However, as subsequent work by Ramus (2002)suggests, there were important methodological


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differences between Ramus et al.’s (1999) andGrabe & Low’s (2002) studies, which mightaccount for the different findings. Grabe &Low (2002) analyzed speech from one speakerper language, whereas Ramus et al. (1999)recorded four speakers for each language, thusobtaining a measure that matched the generalpattern of languages more closely than did theidiosyncrasies of individual speakers.

The classification in terms of %V, �V, and�C suggested that it wasn’t specific segmentalidentity that defined rhythm, but rather therelative length and variability of vocalic andconsonantal spaces. Ramus & Mehler (1999)and Ramus et al. (1999) tested this prediction ina series of experiments in which they replacedindividual vowels by /a/ and individual conso-nants by /s/. Utterances resynthesized this waysuppressed phonemic and consequently lexicalidentity, but preserved the proportion of vowelsand consonants in the signal. Adults as wellas newborns were able to discriminate ut-terances from two rhythmically differentlanguages when this resynthesis was applied.However, they failed when both vowelsand consonants were transformed into /a/,suppressing the difference between them.These results clearly established that the threeparameters relating to the ratio of vowels andconsonants in the speech signal were necessaryand sufficient acoustic cues for rhythm-basedlanguage discrimination at birth. The dis-crimination of rhythmically similar languagesemerges at around age 4 months; it has beenhypothesized to rely on more subtle cues, suchas phoneme identity or phonotactics (Bosch &Sebastian-Galles 2001, Ramon-Casas et al.2009).

In addition to language discrimination, lin-guistic rhythm might also serve as a boot-strapping cue for morphosyntax. Languagesbelonging to different rhythmic classes alsoshow different morphosyntactic properties. Forinstance, mora-timed languages, that is, lan-guages with a high value for %V, such asJapanese, tend to have simple syllabic struc-ture, agglutinating morphology, and object-verb (OV) word order, whereas languages with

lower %V values, such as English or Polish,typically have complex syllable structure, in-flecting morphology, and VO word order(Fenk-Oczlon & Fenk 2005). Given these cor-relations, Mehler et al. (2004) have proposedthat rhythm might act as a bootstrap for gen-eral morphosyntactic type. The proposal hasn’tbeen tested empirically, but it is of potential im-portance because it links a robust acoustic cue,detected even by neonates, to the most generaland most abstract morphosyntactic properties.

THE WORD SEGMENTATIONPROBLEM: LEARNINGMECHANISMS ANDPERCEPTUAL PRIMITIVES

Parallel to the task of breaking the syntac-tic code of their native language, infants alsoneed to start building a lexicon. According toan increasingly widespread view (see Swingley2009 for a review), lexical acquisition starts asearly as the second half of the first year oflife, when infants begin to segment potentialword forms out of the continuous speech streamthey hear. These forms are believed not yetto be reliably associated with meaning; never-theless, they play a significant role not only inbuilding the lexicon, but also in morphosyntac-tic acquisition. In other words, lexical acquisi-tion starts much before infants utter their firstwords.

Learning word forms is a challenging tasksince speech is continuous: Most word bound-aries are not marked by pauses, and wordstypically do not occur in isolation. Yet thesensitivity to potential word forms appears asearly as birth. Newborns are able to discrim-inate identical phoneme sequences that onlydiffer in that some span a word boundary,whereas others don’t (e.g., panorama typiqueversus mathematicien, respectively; Christopheet al. 1994). This result provides a good ex-ample of infants’ early sensitivity to perceptualGestalts like edges and to prosodic structure ingeneral. In addition, newborns are also able todiscriminate word forms with different patternsof lexical stress (Sansavini et al. 1997).


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These early sensitivities notwithstanding,extracting and storing a relatively large num-ber of word forms from speech starts onlyat about age 6 to 8 months. Several mecha-nisms have been proposed to account for thisfeat. Statistical learning has been proposed asa general-purpose, potentially universal mech-anism, which might be operational early on,whereas language-specific mechanisms, whichrequire some familiarity with the native lan-guage, such as tracking allophonic variation,phonotactics, or stress patterns, are suggestedto emerge somewhat later (Swingley 2005).

Statistically Based Word Segmentation

Proponents of structural linguistics (Harris1955) and information theory (Shannon 1948)have long recognized that the statistical infor-mation encoded in language provides cues to itsconstituent units (e.g., morphemes and words)and structural patterns. Some words are muchmore frequent, that is, more probable, than oth-ers in absolute terms (e.g., this, it, in, are, dog,time) or in a given context (e.g., chips after fishand. . .; do or is at the beginning of a sentence).

Building on these observations, Hayes &Clark (1970) tested whether adult participantscan use statistical information to extract wordsfrom a continuous stream of sine-wave speechanalogs and found successful segmentation.Later, Saffran et al. (1996) showed that 8-month-old infants could use statistical infor-mation, more specifically transition probabil-ities (TPs; i.e., the probability with which onesyllable predicts the next or the previous one),to segment a continuous stream of syllables,where syllables within a word predicted one an-other with a probability of 1.00, while syllablesspanning word boundaries had TPs of 0.33. In-fants could use dips in TPs to identify wordboundaries.

Statistical learning has been shown to be arobust, domain-general, age-independent, andnot specifically human ability. It operates overspeech sounds as well as tones (Kudo et al.2006) and visual stimuli (Fiser & Aslin 2002a,b).It is performed by newborns (Teinonen et al.

2009), infants at 8 and 13 months (Saffran et al.1996), and adults (Pena et al. 2002). More-over, nonhuman species, such as tamarin mon-keys (Hauser et al. 2001) and rats (Toro &Trobalon 2005), are also able to learn statisticalinformation.

Perceptual and Linguistic Constraintson Statistical Learning

Saffran et al.’s (1996) results shed new light onthe well-known fact that humans are powerfulstatistical learners. But how is statistical learn-ing used in language acquisition? A recent setof studies suggests that statistics are not usedacross the board for learning language. Rather,they are recruited for specific learning tasks—in particular, word segmentation and lexicalacquisition—triggered by cues in the speechsignal, and their application is limited by lin-guistic constraints.

Inspired by the fact that both morphologyand syntax make use of constructions with dis-tant dependencies, Pena et al. (2002), New-port & Aslin (2004), and Newport et al. (2004)asked the question whether transition probabil-ities between nonadjacent items can be learned.Pena et al. (2002) found that adults readily seg-mented out trisyllabic words from an artifi-cial language when they were defined by highTPs between the first and the last syllables(A X C). However, subjects failed to general-ize the pattern to novel X items unless (sub-liminal) segmentation cues were inserted intothe stream to facilitate the original segmenta-tion task, allowing participants to better processthe regularity (Pena et al. 2002). These resultssuggest that cues in the signal, for example,pauses, act as triggers for different processingmechanisms, for example, statistics versus rulegeneralization.

A second and related issue that arises is thenature of the units or representations to whichstatistical computations apply. Bonatti et al.(2005) observed that adults readily segmentover nonadjacent consonants, but not overnonadjacent vowels. This finding was furtherconfirmed by Toro et al. (2008), who devised


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a series of artificial grammar experiments toshow that consonants and vowels serve aspreferential input to different kinds of learningmechanisms. They found that participantsperformed well when their task was to dostatistical computations over consonants orrule-learning over vowels (the rule to belearned was a repetition-based generalization).But their performance dropped to chance inthe opposite case, i.e., statistical computationsover vowels and rule-learning over consonants.Taken together, these studies indicate that notall linguistic representations are equally suit-able for statistical learning. Consonants seemto be the primary target, while vowels are pref-erentially recruited for rule learning.1 Thesefindings converge with certain observationsin linguistics (Nespor et al. 2003) suggestingthat consonants and vowels have differentlinguistic functions. Consonants are believedto be responsible for encoding the lexicon; e.g.,consonantal stems carry the semantic contentsof lexical items in Semitic languages. Bycontrast, vowels are claimed to signal morpho-logical form and syntactic function, e.g., Ablautphenomena in Germanic languages, sing, sang,sung. These studies provide further evidencethat statistical computations are selectively trig-gered and constrained by cues in the input, andtheir primary function is lexical segmentation.

However, the use of statistics for segmen-tation and word-form learning might not beuniversal. In some languages, such as Chineseor infant-directed English, most words aremonosyllabic, rendering statistical com-putations vacuous (Yang 2004, Yang &Gambell 2004). Morphologically complexlanguages, such as Hungarian (haz-a-i-nk-bol

1It needs to be noted that Newport & Aslin (2004) found suc-cessful statistical segmentation for vowels as well as conso-nants. However, they used an artificial speech stream that al-lowed immediate repetitions of the same word frame, makingthe statistical patterns highly salient, whereas Bonatti et al.’s(2005) and Toro et al.’s (2008) stream had no immediate rep-etitions. It seems, then, that vowels might also be used forstatistical computations under special conditions, such as theinformationally highly redundant stream used by Newport& Aslin (2004).

‘house.possessive.plural.1stpl.from’ “from ourhouses”) and Turkish, might pose the oppositeproblem, as it is not clear what unit wouldbe segmented out: complex word forms orindividual stems and suffixes.

Taken together, these studies indicate thatstatistical segmentation alone is not sufficientto solve the task of extracting word forms fromcontinuous speech. Other cues, taking into ac-count the morphophonological properties ofindividual languages, are needed to comple-ment statistical computations.

Language-Specific Cuesto Segmentation

Although words are not separated by clearpauses in continuous speech, there are someacoustic and phonological features that corre-late reliably enough with word boundaries toallow successful segmentation in most cases. Atleast three such cues have been identified inthe literature, mostly on the basis of English:word-level stress patterns, phonotactic regular-ities, and allophonic variation.

Many languages assign word-level stress toa specific position within words; for example,Hungarian, has strictly word-initial stress. Buteven in languages where stress is not fixed butis lexically determined for each word, there arepredominant patterns that can serve as heuris-tic cues. In English, word-level stress is lex-ically determined, but most bisyllabic nounsfollow a strong-weak, that is, trochaic pattern(e.g., doctor, infant) Thus, segmenting speechat strong syllables is a potentially useful heuris-tic known as the metrical segmentation strategy(Cutler 1994, Cutler & Carter 1987). Indeed,Jusczyk et al. (1999) found that 7.5-month-old English-exposed infants show a trochaicbias, treating heavy syllables as word-initial(doctor, candle). Importantly, the bias requiredwords to be multisyllabic. Heavy monosylla-bles (dock, can) were not recognized ( Jusczyket al. 1999), but trisyllabic words with initialstress (strong-weak-weak) were treated as fa-miliar, whereas weak-strong-weak and weak-weak-strong patterns were not (Curtin et al.


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2001). Importantly, the metrical segmentationstrategy is a heuristic tool, since some Englishbisyllables are not trochaic, but iambic (e.g.,gui’tar). In these cases, the strategy predicts ini-tial missegmentation. This was confirmed em-pirically: 7.5-month-olds who readily recognizetrochaic words in continuous passages failedto show similar recognition for iambs ( Jusczyket al. 1999).

Legal and illegal phoneme distributions,that is, phonotactics, also provide informationabout word boundaries. In English, the se-quence /br/ is frequent word initially, but it israre word internally. Therefore, it is a good can-didate for a potential word onset. Conversely,words frequently end in /nt/, which is there-fore a possible cue to the end of words. In atask where infants were exposed to CVCCVC(C, consonant; V, vowel) sequences with word-internally frequent or infrequent CC clusters,they segmented the sequences into two wordsin the latter case, but not in the former case(Mattys et al. 1999; Mattys & Jusczyk 2001a,b).

Variation in the realization of phonemes,known as allophony, can also indicate wordboundaries. In English, for instance, aspiratedstop consonants appear at the onsets of stressedsyllables, whereas their unaspirated allophonesappear elsewhere (Church 1987). At 9 monthsof age, infants are able to posit word bound-aries based on allophonic (e.g., night rates ver-sus nitrates) and distributional cues, and at10.5 months, allophonic cues alone are suffi-cient for successful segmentation ( Jusczyk et al.1999).

The Interaction of Statistical andLanguage-Specific Cues

The above cues are mostly heuristic in natureand might lead to missegmentation in less fre-quent or atypical cases. Such missegmentationscan be induced in experimental conditions( Jusczyk et al. 1999) and can also be observedin young children’s spontaneous production(Slobin 1997). However, infants acquire themajority of the word forms they know withouterror. This implies that they are using more

than just one cue at a time, since convergingcues yield more accurate segmentation.

Several studies have shown that young in-fants are indeed capable of using different cuessimultaneously. When stress and phonotac-tic cues provide conflicting information aboutword boundaries, 9-month-old infants prefer torely on stress cues (Mattys et al. 1999; Mattys &Jusczyk 2001a,b). When stress and statistical in-formation are contrasted, 6-month-olds followthe statistical information (Saffran & Thiessen2003), whereas 8-month-olds use stress cues( Johnson & Jusczyk 2001). This shift indicates amove from universal to more language-specificstrategies as infants gain increasing familiaritywith their native language.

Artificial grammar learning work with adultsalso indicates that statistical information andprosody are both computed in segmentationtasks, and prosody is typically used to constrainstatistics in linguistically meaningful ways, asdiscussed above. If, for instance, the continu-ous speech stream is not monotonous as usedin Saffran et al.’s (1996) original work, buthas utterance-like intonational contours over-laid on it, then participants readily segment sta-tistically coherent words inside prosodic con-tours, but not spanning two contours (Shuklaet al. 2007). Similarly, while participants erro-neously recognize “phantom words” in artifi-cial speech streams, that is, words that neveroccurred in the stream, but their pair-wise syl-lable transitions have high probabilities (e.g.,fekula was never heard, but fe-ku and ku-la ap-peared in the stream with high TPs), this falserecognition can be suppressed if the stream con-tains prosodic cues to word boundaries, such aspauses or word-final lengthening (Endress &Mehler 2009).

Early Form-Meaning Associations

As suggested above, infants start learning wordsas early as age 6 to 8 months by extracting po-tential word forms from the input using statis-tical as well as phonological cues (see Swingley2009 for a review). In order to develop a lexi-con, they also need to start matching these word


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forms with possible meanings. Learning the fullmeaning of words, especially abstract words orgrammatical functors, requires advanced abili-ties, such as categorization, understanding ref-erentiality, and solving the induction problemfor meaning (Nazzi & Bertoncini 2003, Quine1960, Waxman & Gelman 2009). We do notdiscuss these complex and advanced forms ofword learning here. We only review the earlieststages of lexical acquisition, when a linguisticlabel gets associated with a perceptually avail-able, concrete object.

These early associations were investigatedby Stager & Werker (1997), who showed thatinfants use their phonological knowledge andrepresentations differently at different stages ofthe word-learning process. At 8 months, beforeword learning en masse begins, infants read-ily discriminate a minimal pair of word forms,bih and dih, and they are also able to associatethem with two different objects. At 14 months,which is the beginning of the word-learningstage, infants succeed in the simple phoneticdiscrimination task, but fail to distinguish thetwo words when they are used in a labeling con-text, that is, associated with two distinct objects.They succeed, however, even in this context ifthe words are very distinct, for example, lif andneem. At 17 months, when word learning is infull swing, infants succeed again in both tasks.The authors accounted for these results by ar-guing that phonological knowledge is recruitedfor word learning in different ways at differentdevelopmental stages. When starting to asso-ciate word forms with meanings, infants needto pay attention to the details of both and estab-lish an association between them. At this earlystage, infants might not attribute more impor-tance to the minimal phonemic difference be-tween two words than to other properties of thewords, such as the speaker’s gender. Given thehigh cognitive demands of the association task,a minimal phonemic difference might go un-noticed. At later stages, when infants becomeexperienced word learners, label-object associ-ations become less taxing for the cognitive sys-tems; thus, even minor differences can be morereadily utilized.

Confirmation for the cognitive load hy-pothesis comes from recent studies that foundsuccessful associations in 14-month-olds withminimally different labels when the cognitiveload of the task was reduced, e.g., by usingwords known to the infants (Fennell & Werker2003), by prefamiliarizing them with the objects(Fennell & Werker 2004), by giving them avisual choice between two objects in a test(Yoshida et al. 2009), or by making the acousticdifference between words more salient (Curtinet al. 2009) or more relevant for the task(Thiessen 2007).

BROAD LEXICAL CATEGORIES:FUNCTORS AND CONTENTWORDS

Words in the lexicon are organized into hierar-chical categories. The most general and cross-linguistically universal divide is the one betweenclosed-class functors (free or bound), such asarticles, pronouns, and pre- or postpositions,and open-class content words, such as nouns,verbs, and adjectives. The most important dif-ference between these two broad categoriesis functional: Functors signal morphosyntacticstructure (e.g., plurality, tense, and argumentstructure), whereas content words carry lexicalmeaning. In addition, there are a number of sta-tistical and acoustic/phonological differencesbetween them. Functors have very high tokenfrequencies. In corpora, they often account for30% to 50% of the whole input (Gervain et al.2008b, Kucera & Francis 1967). Content wordstypically have much lower token frequencies.By contrast, they are acoustically more salient,as they carry stress, consist of multiple sylla-bles, and have at least one nonreduced vowel(Morgan et al. 1996).

It is well known that young children oftenomit functors in their early productions (Guasti2002), which raised the question of whetherthey are able to perceive and represent func-tors at all. An early study (Shipley et al. 1969)showed that children whose linguistic produc-tion was at the telegraphic phase (i.e., containedno function words) nevertheless understood


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instructions better if the instructions them-selves were not telegraphic, but contained func-tion words as well. Later, Gerken et al. (1990)established that the omission of functors inearly production stems from a limitation onproduction and not on perception or encod-ing. In a series of imitation experiments with2- to 3-year-old children, they found that chil-dren tend to omit weak, unstressed monosyl-labic morphemes, typically functors, but notstrong, stressed ones, typically content words,even if both are nonsense non-English words.Also, they imitate nonexisting content wordswith greater ease if they appear in the envi-ronment of real English function words as op-posed to environments of nonsense functionwords. Moreover, children make a distinctionbetween those nonsense functors that followthe usual consonant patterns of English func-tors and those that do not. Taken together, theseresults indicate that even though young chil-dren produce few functors, they build fairly de-tailed representations of them, which they canuse in segmenting and labeling the incomingspeech stream. In a later experiment, Gerken& McIntosh (1993) obtained similar results forsentence comprehension.

The above experiments were carried outwith children who already have substantialknowledge of the grammar of their native lan-guage. But segmentation and labeling cues aremost relevant at the beginning of acquisition tobreak up the input. Indeed, Shi et al. (1999)asked whether newborns are able to distin-guish functors and content words on the basisof the phonological differences between them.Their findings indicate that newborn infantsof both English-speaking and non-English-speaking mothers are able to categorically dis-criminate between English function and con-tent words presented in isolation. By 6 monthsof age, infants start to show a preference forcontent words (Shi & Werker 2001), and by11 months, they are also able to represent fre-quent functors in some phonological detail (Shiet al. 2006). They are also able to use functors,frequent and infrequent ones alike, to segmentout a following content word (Shi et al. 2006).

Hohle & Weissenborn (2003) obtained similarresults, showing functor versus content worddiscrimination in 7- to 9-month-old Germaninfants exposed to continuous speech.

On the basis of the findings described above,it is not unreasonable to assume that the func-tion word versus content word distinction isavailable to infants very early on, and althoughfunctors might not frequently appear in infants’earliest productions, they might be amongtheir earliest word form representations, serv-ing to bootstrap the early content words cate-gories, e.g., nouns and verbs. Borrowed fromthe structuralist-generativist linguistic tradi-tion, the idea that functors are fundamental forthe categorization of content words has recentlygained empirical support from corpus studies(Mintz 2002, Redington et al. 1998).

WORD ORDER AND OTHERTYPOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES

The acquisition and production of the firstwords at around the age of one year markan important milestone in young infants’ lan-guage development. Multiword utterances ap-pear much later, after the second birthday.However, the acquisition of the most basic syn-tactic properties of the native language, suchas word order, might actually start much ear-lier, during the first year of life, in parallel withand possibly in relation to early speech percep-tion and word-learning abilities. Indeed, Brown(1973) has shown that infants get basic wordorder right from their first productions, whichsuggests that word order is a property that theyhave acquired prior to the production of multi-word utterances.

How do infants acquire word order so early?According to the lexicalist position (Tomasello2000), infants and young children initially donot represent word order in an abstract form.Rather, they learn relatively fixed constructions,often specific to individual lexical items, usuallyindividual verbs (for example, eat is precededby a noun phrase, the eater, and is followedby a noun phrase, the eatee). The generativistaccount, by contrast, assumes that even young


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learners have general and abstract word-orderrepresentations encoding the relative order ofthe phrasal head and its complements and spec-ifiers. For example, in a language with a head-complement, these technical terms are alwaysspelled with capital initials; in linguistics, itwould be better to follow this conventional or-der: objects follow verbs, nouns follow prepo-sitions, etc. (e.g., eat an apple; on the table). Oneway to differentiate between these two accountsis to show that infants have some rudimentaryrepresentation of word order prior to the ac-quisition of a sizeable lexicon.

Recent results suggest that such a prelex-ical word-order representation might be cre-ated early on using frequency as a bootstrappingcue (Gervain et al. 2008b). As discussed above,functors are more frequent than content words.In addition, their position relative to utteranceboundaries correlates with the general word or-der of languages (Gervain et al. 2008b, Morganet al. 1996). In Italian, for instance, the gen-eral word order is VO; therefore, functors thathead a phrase appear phrase initially (for exam-ple, prepositions: sul tavolo on-the table ‘on thetable’). By contrast, in Japanese, functors head-ing phrases are final (for example, postpositions:Tokyo ni Tokyo to ‘to Tokyo’). In infant-directedspeech corpora in these two languages, the dis-tribution of frequent words, that is, functors,was exactly the opposite. In Italian, most two-word phrases at utterance boundaries startedwith a frequent word, that is, functor, whereasin Japanese, most of these phrases ended in afrequent word. Importantly, 8-month-old in-fants appear to be sensitive to these distribu-tional differences. When exposed to a struc-turally ambiguous artificial speech stream inwhich frequent and infrequent nonwords al-ternated and the beginning and the end ofthe stream was ramped in amplitude to maskphase information, Japanese infants preferredto parse the stream into frequent-final units,whereas Italian infants showed longer lookingtimes for frequent-initial test items (Gervainet al. 2008b). This suggests that prelexical in-fants show a rudimentary initial representationof word order, at least in terms of the relative

positions of frequent and infrequent words,that is, typically functors and content words.This finding has been confirmed by recent re-sults ( J. Hochmann, A. Endress, and J. Mehler,manuscript under review) suggesting that in-fants do indeed treat frequent words as functorsand infrequent ones as content words. Wheninfants were given the choice to pair either thefrequent words or the infrequent words withobjects, they chose the infrequent ones as pos-sible labels for naming objects ( J. Hochmann,A. Endress, and J. Mehler, manuscript underreview).

However, unlike Italian and Japanese, somelanguages do not show a consistent word-orderpattern. German, for example, uses both OVand VO orders within the verb phrase, depend-ing on the syntactic context. Also, some infantsgrow up with an OV and a VO language simul-taneously (for example, Japanese and English).In these cases, frequency alone does not provideenough information about word order, sinceboth frequent-initial and frequent-final phrasesoccur in the input. This implies that furthercues are necessary to bootstrap word order. Onecue that has been suggested in the literatureis prosody. Nespor et al. (2008) found that thelocation and the acoustic realization of prosodicprominence correlate with word order bothacross and within languages. Thus, in OV lan-guages such as Turkish and in phrases with OVorder within mixed languages such as German,prominence within prosodic phrases is initial,and it is implemented as a pitch contrast (high-low), whereas in VO languages such as Italianor French as well as in the VO phrases of mixedlanguages, a durational contrast is utilized,and prominence is final (short-long). If infantscan use this prosodic cue in conjunction withfrequency, then a more precise and fine-grainedrepresentation of word order can be acquired,even in cases where the two word orders, OVand VO, occur within a single language.

It has been argued that this grouping,that is, prominence-initial for pitch or inten-sity contrasts and prominence-final for dura-tional contrasts, is an auditory bias that ap-plies to speech and nonspeech stimuli alike (the


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iambic-trochaic law; Hayes 1995). More re-cently, some data have been reported suggest-ing that the grouping principle might emergeas a result of language experience (Iversen et al.2008; K.A. Yoshida, J.R. Iversen, A.D. Patel, R.Mazuka, H. Nito, J. Gervain, and F. Werker,manuscript under revision). However, these re-sults are not conclusive, as other studies havefound no language-related differences (R. Bion,S. Benavides, and M. Nespor, manuscript un-der review; Hay & Diehl 2007). Irrespectiveof whether this bias is independent of lan-guage experience or a result of it, infants mightuse it as a cue to word order at a very earlyage.

The hypothesis that even prelexical infantsmight possess some simple word order repre-sentations, possibly bootstrapped by frequencyand prosody, received independent confirma-tion from studies using naturalistic stimuli inGerman. Weissenborn et al. (1996) found thatGerman infants were sensitive to word orderviolations in German subordinate clauses.

THE NEURAL CORRELATES OFLANGUAGE IN YOUNG INFANTS

With the advancement of brain imaging tech-niques, it has become increasingly possible topursue the original agenda of the research onthe biological foundations of language withinfant populations. Researchers have startedcharting the brain areas and circuits dedicatedto language and speech perception in newbornsand young infants.

One of the most important findings of thisincreasing body of research is that the newbornand infant brain shows a functional organiza-tion for language processing that is similar tothat of the adult brain (Dehaene-Lambertz et al.2002, 2008; Gervain et al. 2008a; Pena et al.2003; Taga & Asakawa 2007). This organiza-tion appears to be at least partly under geneticcontrol and develops even without experiencewith language (e.g., in congenitally deaf indi-viduals; Dehaene-Lambertz et al. 2008).

More specifically, it has been observed that3-month-old infants as well as newborns show

a left-hemisphere advantage when listeningto speech as compared with reversed speechand silence (Bortfeld et al. 2009, Dehaene-Lambertz et al. 2002, Pena et al. 2003). Thisearly left lateralization has been confirmed us-ing diffusion tensor imaging, a technique that isable to track white matter fascicles and myeli-nation. The left hemisphere showed advanceddevelopment in 2-month-old infants (Duboiset al. 2008). Interestingly, those aspects of lan-guage processing that are usually right lateral-ized in adults, e.g., the processing of prosody,also appear to be right lateralized in infants(Homae et al. 2006, 2007).

In addition to this general lateralization pat-tern, recent results have allowed identificationof the areas involved in language processing at amore fine-grained level. Gervain et al. (2008a),using near-infrared spectroscopy, have foundthat the newborn brain is able to extract identi-cal, adjacent repetitions of syllables from speechstimuli. The repetitions were detected as somekind of perceptual Gestalt or primitive by theleft (and to a lesser extent by the right) tem-poral areas immediately upon exposure. Overthe course of the study, the repeated expo-sure to dozens of different stimuli, all instan-tiating the same underlying regularity (AAB:“mubaba,” “penana,” etc.), also gave rise to anincreased response in the left frontal areas, sug-gesting the general pattern has been learnedor extracted from the stimuli. This connec-tion between the temporal areas, responsiblefor auditory processing, and the frontal areas,involved in higher-level learning and memory,has also been documented in a series of stud-ies by Dehaene-Lambertz and her collaborators(Dehaene-Lambertz & Baillet 1998; Dehaene-Lambertz & Gliga 2004; Dehaene-Lambertzet al. 2006, 2008). These authors used activationspeed to identify a circuit of areas, from the pri-mary auditory cortex through the superior tem-poral gyrus to the inferior frontal area, whichrespond to speech in a hierarchical, cascadingfashion, possibly integrating over increasinglylarge and/or abstract linguistic units.

These results indicate that brain orga-nization shows structural and functional


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specialization for language from the start. Thisis not to say, though, that language experiencehas no role to play. We demonstrated abovehow language experience shapes phonologicaland morphosyntactic development during thefirst year of life when measured behaviorally.In the past decade, numerous studies emergeddocumenting the underlying neural changes(for a recent review, see Kuhl & Rivera-Gaxiola2008). For instance, Kuhl et al. (2008) foundthat at 7.5 months, better discriminationabilities for native phonemes, measured usingelectrophysiological techniques, correlate withthe rate of later language development. Thisfinding suggests that behavioral attunementto the native language is mediated by brainstructures that become specifically responsiveto frequently encountered, i.e., native, linguis-tic contrasts, which in turn promotes furtherlearning of linguistic distinctions relevant forthe native language and suppresses sensitivityto nonnative contrasts. Word learning alsoshows electrophysiological signatures at anearly age. Familiar words evoke responses thatare different in amplitude as well as in scalpdistribution measurements from responses tounfamiliar words from about 9 months of age(Molfese 1990, Vihman et al. 2007).

Most of these studies were carried out withinfants exposed to just one language. In manylinguistic communities, though, exposure tomultiple languages is the norm. An increas-ing body of research is now attempting tounderstand how such an environment affectsphonological discrimination and categorization(Bosch & Sebastian-Galles 1997, Conboy &Mills 2006, Mehler et al. 2004, Weikum et al.2007, Werker & Byers-Heinlein 2008).

Interestingly, exposure to two languagesfrom birth seems to affect development inother cognitive domains as well. In a series ofexperiments, Kovacs & Mehler (2009a,b) haveexplored why bilingually raised children, havingto learn twice as much about language as theirmonolingual peers, display a speed of acquisi-tion comparable to that of monolingual infants.In the first study, Kovacs & Mehler (2009a)compared 7-month-old monolingual and

bilingual groups in an eye-tracker task, wherethey had to learn to anticipate where a puppetwould appear on the screen immediately aftera trisyllabic word was heard. Both groupsperformed equally well in this task. During thesecond phase of the experiment, immediatelyafter the first phase, both groups had to learnthat the puppet appeared on the opposite sideof the screen. Bilinguals learned this secondtask as fast as the first one, whereas monolin-guals’ performance was at chance. The authorsconcluded that continuous exposure to twolanguages during early infancy enhances theexecutive functions, attesting that the plasticityof certain brain regions prevents infants frompotential confusion. In a second experimentwith 12-month-olds, the same authors showedthat when two structures, namely AAB andABA, were used to cue infants to look to oneside of the screen upon exposure to AAB and tothe other side when ABA was heard (the presen-tation was interleaved), monolinguals learnedto respond to the simpler structure AAB andwere at chance for the other structure, whereasbilinguals learned both structures. The authorsconcluded, “The advantage of bilinguals maybe related to the precocious development ofcontrol and selection abilities. . . This in turnmay help them to learn more efficiently eachof their languages. Such powerful learningabilities allow bilinguals to pass the linguisticmilestones at the same rate as monolinguals”(Kovacs & Mehler 2009b).

CONCLUSION

In this review, we presented theoretical ap-proaches and underlying mechanisms proposedto explain infants’ first steps into language. Wehave reviewed evidence suggesting that nativistand empiricist proposals are incomplete if theyfail to include innate dispositions and learningin a broader, integrative, biologically anchoredlanguage acquisition theory. In addition, wehave shown that a third type of mechanism,perceptual and memory constraints, needs tobe evoked to provide a full account of earlyacquisition.


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This integrative stance proposes that thethree mechanisms are triggered by differentproperties of the input. For instance, statisticalcomputations are evoked when the learner en-counters an unsegmented speech stream. Thesecomputations selectively target some linguis-tic units, e.g., consonants, but not others, e.g.,vowels. However, if the speech stream is alreadysegmented, rule extraction and generalizationmechanisms are used. In sum, the three pro-cessing and learning mechanisms complementas well as constrain each other.

Such an interaction of complementarymechanisms is not surprising from a biologi-cal point of view. Indeed, from an evolutionaryperspective, the recruitment of a mechanism

for a novel function is frequently observed( Jacob 1977). Therefore, it is plausible to as-sume that several of the mechanisms underly-ing our linguistic abilities are shared with otherspecies. However, it remains true that only hu-mans have language. Therefore, the quest is stillon to identify the specific set of abilities thathas emerged during our unique evolutionaryhistory.

We have attempted to illustrate above howresearch into cognitive abilities and brain or-ganization in young infants, in conjunctionwith information about the precursors that weshare with other organisms, may shed light onthe specifically human abilities that make us alanguage-learning animal.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors are not aware of any biases that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of thisreview.

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AR398-FM ARI 7 November 2009 7:47

Annual Review ofPsychology

Volume 61, 2010 Contents

Prefatory

Love in the Fourth DimensionEllen Berscheid � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1

Brain Mechanisms and Behavior

The Role of the Hippocampus in Prediction and ImaginationRandy L. Buckner � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �27

Learning and Memory Plasticity; Neuroscience of Learning

Hippocampal-Neocortical Interactions in Memory Formation,Consolidation, and ReconsolidationSzu-Han Wang and Richard G.M. Morris � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �49

Stress and Neuroendocrinology

Stress Hormone Regulation: Biological Roleand Translation Into TherapyFlorian Holsboer and Marcus Ising � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �81

Developmental Psychobiology

Structural Plasticity and Hippocampal FunctionBenedetta Leuner and Elizabeth Gould � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 111

Cognitive Neuroscience

A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Reconsolidation as a Link BetweenCognitive and Neuroscientific Memory Research TraditionsOliver Hardt, Einar Orn Einarsson, and Karim Nader � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 141

Cognitive Neural Prosthetics

Richard A. Andersen, Eun Jung Hwang, and Grant H. Mulliken � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 169

Speech Perception

Speech Perception and Language Acquisition in the First Year of LifeJudit Gervain and Jacques Mehler � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 191

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Chemical Senses (Taste and Smell)

An Odor Is Not Worth a Thousand Words: From MultidimensionalOdors to Unidimensional Odor ObjectsYaara Yeshurun and Noam Sobel � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 219

Somesthetic and Vestibular Senses

Somesthetic SensesMark Hollins � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 243

Basic Learning and Conditioning

Learning: From Association to CognitionDavid R. Shanks � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 273

Comparative Psychology

Evolving the Capacity to Understand Actions, Intentions, and GoalsMarc Hauser and Justin Wood � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 303

Human Development: Processes

Child Maltreatment and MemoryGail S. Goodman, Jodi A. Quas, and Christin M. Ogle � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 325

Emotional, Social, and Personality Development

Patterns of Gender DevelopmentCarol Lynn Martin and Diane N. Ruble � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 353

Adulthood and Aging

Social and Emotional AgingSusan T. Charles and Laura L. Carstensen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 383

Development in Societal Context

Human Development in Societal ContextAletha C. Huston and Alison C. Bentley � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 411

Genetics and Psychopathology

Epigenetics and the Environmental Regulationof the Genome and Its FunctionTie-Yuan Zhang and Michael J. Meaney � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 439

Social Psychology of Attention, Control, and Automaticity

Goals, Attention, and (Un)ConsciousnessAp Dijksterhuis and Henk Aarts � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 467

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Bargaining, Negotiation, Conflict, Social Justice

NegotiationLeigh L. Thompson, Jiunwen Wang, and Brian C. Gunia � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 491

Personality Development: Stability and Change

Personality Development: Continuity and Change Over theLife CourseDan P. McAdams and Bradley D. Olson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 517

Work Motivation

Self-Regulation at WorkRobert G. Lord, James M. Diefendorff, Aaron C. Schmidt, and Rosalie J. Hall � � � � � � � � 543

Cognition in Organizations

CreativityBeth A. Hennessey and Teresa M. Amabile � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 569

Work Attitudes ( Job Satisfaction, Commitment, Identification)

The Intersection of Work and Family Life: The Role of AffectLillian T. Eby, Charleen P. Maher, and Marcus M. Butts � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 599

Human Factors (Machine Information, Person Machine Information,Workplace Conditions)

Cumulative Knowledge and Progress in Human FactorsRobert W. Proctor and Kim-Phuong L. Vu � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 623

Learning and Performance in Educational Settings

The Psychology of Academic AchievementPhilip H. Winne and John C. Nesbit � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 653

Personality and Coping Styles

Personality and CopingCharles S. Carver and Jennifer Connor-Smith � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 679

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 51–61 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 705

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 51–61 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 710

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Psychology articles may be found athttp://psych.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

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