Explicitly Slow, Implicitly Fast, or the Other Way Around? Brain Mechanisms for Word Acquisition

Explicitly Slow, Implicitly Fast, or the Other Way Around? Brain Mechanisms for Word Acquisition Yury Shtyrov1,2*, Alexander Kirsanov2,3 and Olga Shcherbakova2,3 1Department of Clinical Medicine, Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark2Laboratory of Behavioural Neurodynamics, Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia3Department of General Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia Our ability to communicate using language is a specific cognitive faculty that makes humans stand apart from all other animal species on the planet. Despite the crucial role that language plays in our individual and social well-being, the origins of language are still poorly understood from both evolutionary and ontogenetic perspectives. One of the key gaps in the knowledge lies in the understanding of specific cognitive and neural bases of language acquisition that underpin our successful and efficient ability to learn a large number of new words, both as children at all stages of development and as adults when learning a new language or novel professional lexicon. This opinion paper briefly overviews the main systems involved in word acquisition, identifies gaps in the existing evidence and suggests possible ways to close them. The behavioral and neural mechanisms of word acquisition remain a debated topic (for reviews, see e.g., Dollaghan, 1985; Davis and Gaskell, 2009). O...
Source: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research