Categories, words and rules in language acquisition

Acquiring language requires learning a set of words (i.e. the lexicon) and abstract rules that combine them to form sentences (i.e. syntax). In this thesis, we show that infants acquiring their mother tongue rely on different speech categories to extract: words and to abstract regularities. We address this issue with a study that investigates how young infants use consonants and vowels, showing that certain computations are tuned to one or the other of these speech categories...