Sprachwahrnehmung und Spracherwerb im ersten Lebensjahr

There is a lot of evidence that infants are able to perceive and discriminate linguistically relevant features of the speech input from birth on. This ability supports the fast and efficient acquisition of the native language which is typical for the normal course of language learning. Being equipped with these mechanisms the infants acquire knowledge about the specific prosodic and segmental patterns appearing in the native language already during their first months of life. This does not only lead to early knowledge about the phonological system of the language but the infants uses this knowledge for the segmentation of the speech input into linguistically relevant units like words, phrases and sentences. The detection of these units is a relevant basis for the acquisition of syntactic regularities of the native language. This shows that the children have means to bootstrapp from knowledge in one linguistic domain to knowledge in other domains.