You must discover the underlying structure of an immense system which contains tens of thousands of pieces, all generated from a small set of materials. These pieces, in turn, can be combined in an infinite number of ways. Only a subset of those infinite combinations is actually correct. However, just to make things even more difficult, this subset is itself infinite. Somehow you must rapidly converge on the internal structure of this system so that you can use it to communicate. Oh, and you are a very young child.

This system, of course, is human language. Given its richness and complexity, it seems improbable that children could ever discern its structure. Nevertheless, they do, almost without exception. The process of acquiring such a system is unlikely to be any less complex than the system itself.

In our research, I consider the myriad problems facing children acquiring language within a larger framework:

How do humans learn? In particular, what kinds of learning mechanisms do humans possess that allow them to discover structure in their environments?

We take a number of approaches to address this question:

• How do infants, young children, and adults discover structure in languages (often ones that we create ourselves for experimental purposes)?
• What kinds of patterns are not readily learned?
• Do the same learning abilities emerge for language and other domains, such as music?
• Is learning different in atypical populations?
• How does learning differ across species?

Understanding the extraordinary learning abilities our infants
possess will help us to move beyond nature versus nurture to a better understanding of how our internal learning systems interact with the complexities of human environments.