The speed and reliability of language acquisition in human infants remain puzzling facts, especially given the huge variability in the quality and quantity of the speech input. It has been argued that such a robust learning path is due to a specialized Language Acquisition Device (Chomsky 1965), which incorporates statistical mechanisms to extract regular patterns from noisy input (e.g. Saffran...

Frequency counts are a measure of how much use a language makes of a linguistic unit, such as a phoneme or word. However, what is often important is not the units themselves, but the contrasts between them. A measure is therefore needed for how much use a language makes of a contrast, i.e. the functional load (FL) of the contrast. We generalize previous work in linguistics and speech recognitio...

This paper reports the phoneme repertoires and phonological error patterns of 600 Chinese-speaking children aged 2;0 to 7;0. The findings support the hypotheses that phonological acquisition is influenced by the ambient language and the mother tongue.

How does a child start to learn the sound patterns of her native language? There are two diametrically opposed approaches to this problem. According to one approach, the learner always looks for a symbolic representation in input, and such representation is based on a set of universal phonetic features (Chomsky and Halle, 1968). Since phonetic segments – or more intuitively “speech sounds” – ar...