Gateway to Language: The Perception of Prosody at Birth

Abstract

The surprising ease and efficiency with which human infants, but not kittens or young chimps, acquire language has puzzled scholar for decades. We now have a relatively good empirical and theoretical description of the later stages of language acquisition. However, despite considerable research efforts, the initial stage, i.e. the division of labor between the biologically endowed abilities the infant brings to the task of language acquisition and the learning that takes place on the basis of experience, remains poorly understood. Here, I put forth the hypothesis that prosody might be infants’ first gateway to language, ensuring the link between prenatal and postnatal language experience. I will review evidence suggesting that the prosody of the native language(s) experienced prenatally already shapes infants’ speech perception abilities and their neural correlates. I will also show that prosody plays an important bootstrapping role later during the acquisition of syntax. I propose that these two facts are strongly related, and provide insight about the key role that prosody plays during the early stages of language acquisition.