Signal to Syntax

<p>In the beginning before there are words or syntax or discourse there is speech. Speech is an infant's gateway to language. Without exposure to speech no language--or at most only a feeble facsimile of language--develops regardless of how rich a child's biological endowment for language learning may be. But little is given directly in speech--not words for example as anyone who has ever listened to fluent conversation in an unfamiliar language can attest. Rather words and phrases or rudimentary categories--or whatever other information is required for syntactic and semantic analyses to begin operating--must be pulled from speech through an infant's developing perceptual capacities. By the end of the first year an infant can segment at least some words from fluent speech. Beyond this how impoverished or rich an infant's representations of input may be remains largely unknown. Clearly in the debate over determinants of early language acquisition the input speech stream has too often been offhandedly dismissed as a potential source of information.<br><br>This volume brings together internationally-known scholars from a range of disciplines--linguistics psychology cognitive and computer science and acoustics --who share common interests in how speech in its phonological prosodic distributional and statistical properties may encode information useful for early language learning and how such information may be deciphered by very young children. These scholars offer a spectrum of viewpoints on the possibility that aspects of speech may provide bootstraps for language learning; contribute important state-of-the-art findings across a variety of relevant domains; and illuminate critical directions for future inquiry. The publication of this volume represents a significant step in renewing the bonds between two fields that have long been sundered--speech perception and language acquisition.</p>