Rift of Gab: Speech insights spark statistical static
By Bruce Bower
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. That capacity, including the underlying logic of word construction, doesn’t depend on the mental calculations used to recognize individual words, say the researchers.