Temporal Attention as a Scaffold for Language Development

Abstract

Language is one of the most fascinating abilities that humans possess. Infants demonstrate an amazing repertoire of linguistic abilities from very early on and reach an adult-like form incredibly fast. However, language is not acquired all at once but in an incremental fashion. In this article we propose that the attentional system may be one of the sources for this developmental trajectory in language acquisition. At birth, infants are endowed with an attentional system fully driven by salient stimuli in their environment, such as prosodic information (e.g., rhythm or pitch). Early stages of language acquisition could benefit from this readily available, stimulus-driven attention to simplify the complex speech input and allow word segmentation. At later stages of development, infants are progressively able to selectively attend to specific elements while disregarding others. This attentional ability could allow them to learn distant non-adjacent rules needed for morphosyntactic acquisition. Because non-adjacent dependencies occur at distant moments in time, learning these dependencies may require correctly orienting attention in the temporal domain. Here, we gather evidence uncovering the intimate relationship between the development of attention and language. We aim to provide a novel approach to human development, bridging together temporal attention and language acquisition.

Impact of Bilingualism on Infants’ Ability to Learn From Talking and Nontalking Faces

“…2 For simplification purposes we consider stimulus-driven versus goal-directed attention (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002) as a model framework for this study and consider other distinctions (endogenous vs. exogenous attention; Petersen & Posner, 2012) as synonymous. For more discussion about this topic, see de Diego-Balaguer et al (2016). 3 As we measured anticipation over time, infants had to go through the whole experiment-that is, complete the 19 experimental trials.…”

“…Second, the neural circuitry involved in attention and cognitive control is not fully mature at such young ages (Berger, Tzur, & Posner, ; Colombo, ). While stimulus‐driven attention—that is, the ability to orient attention as a function of the exogenous saliency of the stimulus—is mature since 6 months of age, the anatomical structures underlying goal‐directed attention—that is, the ability to voluntarily orient attention as a function of the task‐relevant property of the stimulus—only starts to be functional at this age and keeps on improving during childhood (see de Diego‐Balaguer, Martinez‐Alvarez, & Pons, , for a review). This lack of goal‐directed attention maturity could prevent infants from learning to switch from one region of a speaker's face to the other as fast as needed.…”

Developmental changes in automatic rule‐learning mechanisms across early childhood

“…Saffran et al, 1996), several studies show that even simple word segmentation based on adjacent dependencies breaks down if attention is directed away from the stimuli (Palmer & Mattys, 2016;Toro, Sinnett, & Soto-Faraco, 2005). Since this is already the case for segmentation based on adjacent dependencies, it can be assumed that this also applies to non-adjacent dependencies, the detection of which has been argued to depend on attentional mechanisms (de Diego-Balaguer, Martinez-Alvarez, & Pons, 2016;Pacton & Perruchet, 2008). Infants are usually exposed to the learning stimuli without any instruction regarding their attention, but rather rely on externally driven attentional orientation.…”

Six‐month‐old infants recognize phrases in song and speech

“…The current results also contribute to two more general issues in the field of first language acquisition: The first is the question about shared cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of music, song, and speech; the second pertains the optimal acoustic stimulus for infant language learning. Concerning the first question: Infants' mental organization of speech and song into phrases observed in the current study may be grounded in a modality-general processing mechanism (Conway, Pisoni, & Kronenberger, 2009;Schön et al, 2010;Trehub & Hannon, 2006): A conceivable account would be that the salient acoustic structure of instrumental music, ID song, and ID speech attracts infants' attention to utterance edges (De Diego Balaguer, Martinez-Alvarez, & Pons, 2016;Drake, Jones, & Baruch, 2000;Falk & Kello, 2017;Leong & Goswami, 2015). Alternatively, infants' phrase recognition in ID song might stem from transfer of a speech-specific or even native language-specific prosodic parsing strategy to the song modality (Morgan & Demuth, 1996).…”