Gates to Language

Language is perhaps the most prominent feature that distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Nevertheless, many perceptual and learning mechanisms serving language acquisition are not tailored specifically to language nor to humans.

Decades of research have shown that several animal species are equipped with perceptual, cognitive and neural architectures that allow to learn language but only humans end up doing so. The key features and mechanisms that make language learnable by very young humans are still unclear.

The GALA project focuses on how humans begin to learn language, exploring the biological nature of the mechanisms at the ‘entry-gate’ of language through a comparative-developmental approach involving nonhuman species, human newborns, infants and adults.Syllables are essential processing units of speech at the onset of language acquisition, through which newborns and infants preferentially encode and organize the speech signal.

My proposal is that the mechanisms that allow to parse syllables from speech emerge from evolutionary-ancient sensory processes that likely evolved to compute different inputs in different species.

I will explore two alleged universal linguistic constraints responsible for parsing syllables, and shaping the syllabic structure: Maximal Onset Principle (Research Line 1) and Sonority Hierarchy (Research Line 2).

I will test such constraints across species, and at distinct stages of human development as well as in distinct sensory modalities, with behavioral and neuroimaging techniques.

The GALA project will shed light on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins of the mechanisms through which humans access language, and will provide invaluable new knowledge that will bring us closer to understand why are humans the only species so far able to learn language.