Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Language Perception 52
cross-language variation makes it difficult to maintain the belief in one “universal
stage” of grammatical learning (Bates & Marchman, 1988). Moreover, obvious developmental
progress when acquiring language can be observed in children (proposed to
have full grammatical competence). Generativists consider this development as biologically
driven with three possible scenarios that may account for it: [1] it may result from
improvements in other domains; [2] it may also result from maturation (e.g., of the
brain); or [3] even though the basic principles of grammar are innate, the child has to
adapt gradually to the grammar of its particular language (cf. Clahsen, 1996).
The other main class of theories, the interactionist view assumes that children acquire
their linguistic knowledge by interactions with their environment. It proposes language
development as the product of domain-general learning mechanisms. “Usage-based”
theories assume that children develop linguistic competence gradually, learning to produce
new constructions item by item rather than triggered by pre-specified grammatical
rules (see, e.g., Tomasello, 2000). The acquisition is assumed to be mainly based on
statistical regularities in the input. Accumulating evidence suggests that linguistic facts
can be learned by this way without relying on the abstract or implicit principles proposed
in the theory of universal grammar. The language input was found to contain
relevant features in sufficient abundance to support statistically based acquisition of
several seemingly complex facts about language. 9
Neurophysiological correlates of language acquisition
Neurophysiologic measures may also provide an important additional source of information
for a better understanding of language acquisition. Friederici (2005) reviewed
such evidence from ERP (event-related potential) studies (see Figure 5-1). She proposed
that the similar brain response patterns can be observed in children and adults, which
support the view that language develops in a continuous manner.
In order to understand language, it is an important task to segment the stream of speech
into meaningful units. Even though conversational speech provides acoustic breaks
these do not reliably signal word boundaries. The infant’s task is to figure out the elementary
phonemic categories of its language, before it can try to acquire words, composed
of these phonemes. Some innate skills seem to lead the acquisition of the phonemic
categories. Thus, within the first 2 months of life brain indices for the ability to
9
The many opportunities to entrench the most frequent elements of one’s own native language is illustrated
by an example from Bates, Thal, Finlay and Clancy (2003): One may assume a child that hears approximately
5 hours of speech input per day, at a mean rate of 225 words per minute. Thus, an average 10year-old
child heard 1,034,775,000 English phonemes (at an average of 25,869,375 trials per phoneme),
up to 250 million words (including 17,246,250 renditions of the most common function word) and 28
million sentences.