Rift of Gab: Speech insights spark statistical static

The heated debate over how people acquire language burns on. A new study suggests that adults can exploit patterns in an artificial language to discern novel nonsense words in a stream of syllables, but use a different mental computation to discover rules governing the construction of those words.

This finding supports the theory that people are born with a brain-based grasp of grammar, say psychologist Jacques Mehler of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and his colleagues.