Multiple Cue Integration

The idea of language as shaped by the brain suggests that much of the neural hardware involved in language may not be specific to it. This means that language has to be acquired largely by mechanisms that are not designed for this purpose. In the CSL Lab, we therefore pursue the hypothesis that language has evolved to rely on a constellation of probabilistic information sources, or ‘cues’, for its acquisition. As one example, we have conducted a series of corpus analyses to show that the sound of words can tell us something about what the word means and how it should be used. That is, words contain within them the sound of meaning and the sound of syntax—and further experimental work has revealed that both children and adults are sensitive to such cues when learning and using language. Together, our work suggests that the integration of phonological cues with other types of information, including statistical regularities, is integral to the computational architecture of our language system.