Abstract
Language is one of the most fascinating abilities that humans possess. Infants demonstrate an amazing repertoire of linguistic abilities from very early on and reach an adult-like form incredibly fast. However, language is not acquired all at once but in an incremental fashion. In this article we propose that the attentional system may be one of the sources for this developmental trajectory in language acquisition. At birth, infants are endowed with an attentional system fully driven by salient stimuli in their environment, such as prosodic information (e.g., rhythm or pitch). Early stages of language acquisition could benefit from this readily available, stimulus-driven attention to simplify the complex speech input and allow word segmentation. At later stages of development, infants are progressively able to selectively attend to specific elements while disregarding others. This attentional ability could allow them to learn distant non-adjacent rules needed for morphosyntactic acquisition. Because non-adjacent dependencies occur at distant moments in time, learning these dependencies may require correctly orienting attention in the temporal domain. Here, we gather evidence uncovering the intimate relationship between the development of attention and language. We aim to provide a novel approach to human development, bridging together temporal attention and language acquisition.
Highlights
Temporal Attention as a Scaffold for Language DevelopmentReviewed by: LouAnn Gerken, University of Arizona, USA Andriy Myachykov, Northumbria University, UK
We review evidence supporting the hypothesis that maturation of the attention mechanisms may serve as a scaffold for language development, and we review evidence indicating the close relationship between attention deficits and impairments in language acquisition
We review the developmental trajectory of linguistic abilities in infants, focusing on studies on word segmentation and non-adjacent rule learning, which are the two main milestones of interest for our hypothesis
Summary
Reviewed by: LouAnn Gerken, University of Arizona, USA Andriy Myachykov, Northumbria University, UK. Language is one of the most fascinating abilities that humans possess. In this article we propose that the attentional system may be one of the sources for this developmental trajectory in language acquisition. Stages of language acquisition could benefit from this readily available, stimulus-driven attention to simplify the complex speech input and allow word segmentation. At later stages of development, infants are progressively able to selectively attend to specific elements while disregarding others. This attentional ability could allow them to learn distant non-adjacent rules needed for morphosyntactic acquisition. We gather evidence uncovering the intimate relationship between the development of attention and language. We aim to provide a novel approach to human development, bridging together temporal attention and language acquisition
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