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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

Language Development

Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 18, 2026

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition
12:49

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

Published on: July 13, 2019

Learning phonemes with a proto-lexicon.

Andrew Martin1, Sharon Peperkamp, Emmanuel Dupoux

  • 1Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (EHESS-ENS-CNRS) Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan. amartin@brain.riken.jp

Cognitive Science
|September 19, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Infants learn language-specific sounds by using word pairs, not just sound distributions. This discovery aids understanding infant phoneme acquisition before extensive vocabulary development.

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Last Updated: May 18, 2026

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition
12:49

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Published on: July 13, 2019

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Published on: April 1, 2016

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Infants lose the ability to distinguish non-native language sounds by one year of age.
  • The process of learning language-specific phoneme categories remains largely unknown.
  • Previous models focused on allophonic distributions and phonetic properties.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate alternative information sources for infant phoneme category learning.
  • To propose a model incorporating lexical information for phonemic acquisition.
  • To explain early sensitivity to phonemic categories in infants.

Main Methods:

  • Developed a computational model using minimally differing word pairs as input.
  • Incorporated high-frequency n-grams from speech input to approximate lexical information.
  • Evaluated the reliability of word pairs versus distributional information.

Main Results:

  • Minimally differing word pairs are a reliable source for learning phonemic categories.
  • Lexical approximation via n-grams aids phonemic acquisition, especially with many allophones.
  • This method is more robust than purely distributional information.

Conclusions:

  • Infants may leverage lexical information, like word pairs, for phoneme learning.
  • Top-down lexical influence can facilitate phonemic category development early in life.
  • This explains infant sensitivity to phonemes before a large vocabulary is acquired.