DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE REVIEW Biased to learn language

Abstract Some recent publications that explore the foundations of early language development are reviewed in this article. The reviewadopts the pivotal idea that infants’ advancements are helped by the existence of different types of biases. The infant’s disco veryof the phonological properties of the language of the environment, as well as their learning of words, is assisted by differenttypes of processing biases, ranging from perceptual to social factors. Introduction When thinking about research topics in language develop-ment over the last ten years, I believe that the findingwith the largest impact is the discovery that 8-month-oldinfants are able to segment words from a continuousstream of syllables, after just 2 minutes of exposure.Saffran, Aslin and Newport’s (1996) publication pro-voked a tsunami of studies in the sea of early languagedevelopment. Discovering the scope and limits of thecapacity to extract regularities from the input was put atthe top of the agenda of many different laboratories. Alook at the papers recently published in