Imagine that you are faced with the following challenge:
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.
Within educational research, we 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 students
possess will help us to move beyond intervention and remediation to a better
understanding of how our internal learning systems interact with the
complexities of human environments.
from University of Wisconsin*Madison, Infant Learning Laboratory
