Learning Rediscovered
Elizabeth A. Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman · Science · 1996
Infants can learn more and earlier than we thought. A new result in this week's issue [Saffran et al . ( p. 1926 )] reports that a surprisingly brief exposure to nonsense syllables can fuel the absorption of a sophisticated understanding of their use. Bates and Elman discuss these results in the context of the ongoing debate about whether and how language is a learned ability.