Early Linguistic Representations

Jean-Remy Hochmann
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

When linguists and psycholinguists discuss language, they use a series
of categorical distinctions such as consonants and vowels, function
words and content words, nouns and verbs, etc. In this talk, we ask
whether some of these categories are merely convenient labels to
describe linguistic phenomena, or reflect representations that are
present in young infants’ minds. We will show that consonants and
vowels serve different learning mechanisms by the end of the first
year of life, and that frequency information plays a central role in
the discrimination between content and function words. We conclude
that infants have early linguistic representations, which allow them
to bootstrap into language, by  linking distributional and perceptual
properties to linguistic functions.