Abstract
Recent research has shown that from the beginning on children's language production reflects specific structural properties of their native language, i.e., there are areas characterized by apparent error free acquisition. This suggests that the knowledge underlying the productive capacities must have been acquired before it emerges in the child's utterances. These early steps of language acquisition can be analyzed by studying infants' speech perception and speech processing performance. Studies have shown that infants are especially sensitive to the prosodic features of language from birth on and that they use their prosodic knowledge to solve other problems of language acquisition such as recognizing words in ongoing speech. These early processing and perception skills seem to be of direct relevance for the future lexical and syntactic development.
| Translated title of the contribution | Entering the realm of grammar: language acquisition during the first year of life |
|---|---|
| Original language | German |
| Pages (from-to) | 16-21 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Forum Logopadie |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2005 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Early language acquisition
- Prosody
- Speech perception