Language And Cognition

The 4000 or so human languages display an extraordinary surface diversity; therefore language learning by the infant requires some plasticity. We present here psycholinguistic data suggesting that there are nevertheless some limits on this plasticity. In the first part, we document a "foreign listening syndrome", that is the fact that people listen to foreign speech sounds through the filter of the phonology of their own language (a perceptual equivalent to a foreign accent in production). Even very good bilinguals seem to retain a dominant language. It thus seems that the perceptual system is shaped by early linguistic experience and stays rather rigid afterwards. In the second part, we show that very young babies are able to distinguish between languages, which is a pre-requisite if they are to learn from more than one language. In the third part, we present data from brain-imaging techniques (PET and fMRI) that investigate the cortical representation of speech in more or less 1 T..