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Brain Imaging Investigation of the Neural Correlates of Observing Virtual Social Interactions
Published on: July 6, 2011
Is speech learning 'gated' by the social brain?
1Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. pkkuhl@u.washington.edu
Abstract:
I advance the hypothesis that the earliest phases of language acquisition -- the developmental transition from an initial universal state of language processing to one that is language-specific -- requires social interaction. Relating human language learning to a broader set of neurobiological cases of communicative development, I argue that the social brain 'gates' the computational mechanisms involved in human language learning.
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