Mid-Term Report Summary - BIOCON (Biological origins of linguistic constraints) The principal objective of the present project was to understand how perceptual and cognitive mechanisms likely present in other species guide the way humans tackle the task of language acquisition. Only humans produce language, but extensive research has shown we share with other animals several of the cognitive tools we use to acquire this complex communication system. Following different lines of research, we have demonstrated that several perceptual mechanisms involve in speech perception are already present in non-human animals. We have also shown that linguistic representations that are only present in humans guide some learning mechanisms. Our research suggests that perceptual biases shared across species together with uniquely-human language-specific representations guide the discovery of linguistic structures.
