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.
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Bates et al. (1996) studied this question.
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