This two year fellowship for postdoctoral study will allow Dr. Rebecca Gomez to obtain training in linguistics at the University of Arizona. Her research centers around structural cues in early language acquisition. Research on language acquisition suggests that infants become sensitive to structural cues in language long before they begin using language referentially. Knowledge of structural information in language might also support higher level processing such as that involved in language comprehension. One problem with much of the existing work on this topic is that it focuses on infant's and children's sensitivity to structure in language, without addressing how they acquire that sensitivity. Because of the considerable redundancy in natural language, it is often difficult to determine what factor or factors was responsible for infants' discriminations. An approach that has been used to circumvent these problems with older learners capitalizes on the use of artificial languages, thus enabling more precise control over the language learning environment than is found in natural language studies. The objective of this research, therefore, is to study structural cues in early language acquisition using artificial languages. The extension of the use of artificial languages to infants is of potentially great importance to theories of language acquisition.
