title: Temporal Attention as a Scaffold for Language Development.
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.
authors: Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis AvançatsBarcelona, Spain; Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Institut d'Investigació Biomèdica de BellvitgeBarcelona, Spain; Department of Basic Psychology, University of BarcelonaBarcelona, Spain.
authors: Ruth
authors: R
authors: de Diego-Balaguer
authors: Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Institut d'Investigació Biomèdica de BellvitgeBarcelona, Spain; Department of Basic Psychology, University of BarcelonaBarcelona, Spain.
authors: Anna
authors: A
authors: Martinez-Alvarez
authors: Department of Basic Psychology, University of BarcelonaBarcelona, Spain; Department of Basic Psychology, Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), University of BarcelonaBarcelona, Spain.
authors: Ferran
authors: F
authors: Pons
keywords: attention; infancy; language development; morphosyntactic development; rule learning; statistical learning; temporal orienting; word segmentation