The DOI matches its Crossref record; 120 of the 121 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 88 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.
A new view of language acquisition
Open accessAbstract
At the forefront of debates on language are new data demonstrating infants' early acquisition of information about their native language. The data show that infants perceptually “map” critical aspects of ambient language in the first year of life before they can speak. Statistical properties of speech are picked up through exposure to ambient language. Moreover, linguistic experience alters infants' perception of speech, warping perception in the service of language. Infants' strategies are unexpected and unpredicted by historical views. A new theoretical position has emerged, and six postulates of this position are described.
Overview
AI snapshot
Written from the paper’s full text.
TL;DR
Kuhl proposes a new view of language acquisition in which infants map ambient language through pattern detection, statistical learning, and experience-driven perceptual warping, rather than Skinnerian reinforcement or Chomskyan selection of innate universal grammar/phonetics. Six postulates are offered, including that motherese is instructive and that the critical period depends on neural commitment from experience, not just time.
Key findings
- Infants initially parse phonetic units universally, but this capacity is not speech-specific or species-specific: categorical perception occurs in infants and animals and for nonspeech stimuli; by 12 months infants no longer discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts even though they did so at 6 months.
- Infants exploit statistical properties of speech: 7-month-olds discriminated target syllables better when the transitional probability between /ko/ and /ga/ was 1.0 than when it was reduced to 0.3; 8-month-olds listened longer to new pseudowords formed from parts of original words, indicating statistical word segmentation.
- Language experience warps perception: 6-month-old US and Swedish infants showed the perceptual magnet effect only for native vowel prototypes; Japanese listeners’ multidimensional scaling map for /r-l/ showed no magnet or boundary effects, unlike American listeners.
- Vocal imitation and motherese are linked to learning: by 20 weeks infants clearly imitate /a/, /i/, and /u/ with appropriate relative formant values; infant-directed speech exaggerates vowels in the US, Russia, and Sweden; six tenets include that the critical period is influenced by neural commitment resulting from experience.
Methods
- Theoretical review/colloquium paper, not a new empirical study; it synthesizes behavioral, brain, comparative, and cross-linguistic infant studies.
- No new sample is reported; cited experiments include infants at ages such as 6, 7, 8, 9, and 12 months and 12–20 weeks, plus adults and nonhuman animals.
- Main analysis is narrative synthesis and proposal of six postulates and the Native Language Magnet model; no primary statistical analysis is reported.
Limitations
- Stated: further tests are needed to determine the constraints on categorization, statistical learning, and prototype effects in infants using linguistic and nonlinguistic events; whether constraints for physical objects and speech are identical or different “remains to be examined”; animal/human differences “can be resolved with empirical tests.”
- Evident: as a review, it reports no new experimental data or formal meta-analysis, so conclusions rest on cited studies; some claims, such as bilingual separation effects, are described as anecdotal or hypothetical.
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Claims the paper makes
49 Own interpretation · 44 Not checked yet · 5 No basis given · 3 Own result
In the paper
“At this age, infants clearly imitate the model, and their vowels have appropriate formant frequency values in relation to one another, even though infants' vowels occur in a much higher frequency range (93).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [93] Kuhl P K, Meltzoff A N. J Acoust Soc Am. 1996;100:2425–2438. doi: 10.1121/1.417951. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source
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In the paper
“At this age, infants clearly imitate the model, and their vowels have appropriate formant frequency values in relation to one another, even though infants' vowels occur in a much higher frequency range (93).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [93] Kuhl P K, Meltzoff A N. J Acoust Soc Am. 1996;100:2425–2438. doi: 10.1121/1.417951. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source
boosted- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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A result the paper reports from its own data — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Infant-directed speech also is altered at the phonetic level and these alterations are argued to help infants learn.”
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“The results demonstrated that the phonetic units of infant-directed speech are acoustically exaggerated.”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [106] Kuhl P K, Andruski J E, Chistovich I A, Chistovich L A, Kozhevnikova E V, Ryskina V L, Stolyarova E I, Sundberg U, Lacerda F. Science. 1997;277:684–686. doi: 10.1126/science.277.5326.684. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source
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In the paper
“The results show a stretching of the acoustic space encompassing speech (Fig. 8).”
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Infants discriminated only between stimuli from different phonetic categories (12–14).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [12] Eimas P D, Siqueland E R, Jusczyk P, Vigorito J. Science. 1971;171:303–306. doi: 10.1126/science.171.3968.303. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source
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In the paper
“First, infants detect patterns in language input.”
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“These data, indicating that there is not an immutable loss of phonetic abilities for non-native units (32), did not refute the selectionist position.”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [32] Werker J F. In: An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Language. Gleitman L R, Liberman M, editors. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1995. pp. 87–107. [Google Scholar]
hedged- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“This finding supported the view that domain-general mechanisms were responsible for infants' initial partitioning of the phonetic units of language.”
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Moreover, unlike adults, infants demonstrated the effect for the phonetic units of all languages (15, 16).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [15] Lasky R E, Syrdal-Lasky A, Klein R E. J Exp Child Psych. 1975;20:215–225. doi: 10.1016/0022-0965(75)90099-5. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source
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boosted- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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- Probably not a substantial claim. 7
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In the paper
“The results demonstrate developmental change between 12 and 20 weeks—by 20 weeks, there is clear separation between the three vowel categories for infants (Fig. 7).”
boostedcorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Adults discriminated phonetic units that crossed the “phonetic boundary” between categories but not stimuli that fell within a category.”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [10] Liberman A M, Cooper F S, Shankweiler D P, Studdert-Kennedy M. Psychol Rev. 1967;74:431–461. doi: 10.1037/h0020279. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source
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A result the paper reports from its own data — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Interestingly, however, the data also demonstrated that the kind of partitioning seen for speech is not limited to humans or limited to speech.”
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In the paper
“Werker and her colleagues demonstrated that, by 12 months of age, infants no longer discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts, even though they did so at 6 months of age (31).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [31] Werker J F, Tees R C. Inf Behav Dev. 1984;7:49–63. [Google Scholar] source
boosted- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Infants' strategies are unexpected and unpredicted by historical views.”
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: fails — It may be too vague to check against evidence.
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Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
In the paper
“The phenomenon was language-specific; Japanese adults, for example, failed to show a peak in discrimination at the phonetic boundary of an American English/ra-la/series (as in “rake” vs. “lake”) (11).”
What the sources say
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plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“Research on cognitive development confirms the fact that categorization (83), statistical learning (84), and prototype effects (85) are not unique to speech.”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [83] Younger B A, Cohen L B. In: The Psychology of Learning and Motivation. Bower G H, editor. Vol. 19. San Diego: Academic; 1985. pp. 211–247. [Google Scholar]
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boosted- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“The two systems are thus tightly coupled early on, but the coupling is seen as a coregistration of auditory and motor information, a polymodal mapping, rather than one in which the representation is specified in motor terms.”
plaincorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Perceptual experience that guides sensory-motor learning also is seen in infants' imitation of nonspeech oral movements (94, 95) and in sign language (96).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [94] Meltzoff A N, Moore M K. Early Dev Parent. 1977;6:179–192. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0917(199709/12)6:3/4<179::AID-EDP157>3.0.CO;2-R. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
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plaincorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“A model reflecting this developmental sequence from universal perception to language-specific perception, called the Native Language Magnet model, proposes that infants' mapping of ambient language warps the acoustic dimensions underlying speech, producing a complex network, or filter, through which language is perceived (39, 40, 82).”
What the sources say
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plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim.
In the paper
“This universal contouring soon gives way to a language-specific mapping that distorts perception, completely revising the perceptual space underlying speech processing (65).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [65] Kuhl P K, Williams K A, Lacerda F, Stevens K N, Lindblom B. Science. 1992;255:606–608. doi: 10.1126/science.1736364. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Vocal learning critically depends on hearing the vocalizations of others and hearing oneself produce sound.”
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Mothers addressing infants also increase the variety of exemplars they use, behaving in a way that makes mothers resemble many different talkers, a feature shown to assist category learning in second-language learners (107).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [107] Lively S E, Logan J S, Pisoni D B. J Acoust Soc Am. 1993;94:1242–1255. doi: 10.1121/1.408177. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“They also present new words in a great variety of contexts, which would highlight the internal transitional probabilities of the new words against the backdrop of a variety of contexts (58).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [58] Goodsitt J V, Morgan J L, Kuhl P K. J Child Lang. 1993;20:229–252. doi: 10.1017/s0305000900008266. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar] source
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“These studies show that feedback and reinforcement are not necessary in this process; listeners simply need the right kind of listening experience (36, 113).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [36] McClelland J L, Thomas A, McCandliss B D, Fiez J A. In: Brain, Behavioral, and Cognitive Disorders: The Neurocomputational Perspective. Reggia J, Ruppin E, Glanzman D, editors. Oxford: Elsevier; 1999. pp. 75–80. [Google Scholar] source
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boosted- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“When introducing new words, parents repeat the word often in sterotyped frames (“Where's the __ ,” “See the __ ,” “That's a __ ” (110), which would highlight the items in sentence-final position.”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [110] Peters A M. The Units of Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press; 1983. [Google Scholar]
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“This may be the case because it is easier to map two different sets of phonetic categories (one for each of the two languages) if they can be perceptually separated.”
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
- Rests on an assumption: Infants exposed to two languages do much better if each parent speaks one of the two languages, rather than both parents speaking both languages.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“The hypothesis is that, for Japanese people, learning to process English requires the development of a new map, one more appropriate for English.”
hedgeddirect- Asserted: fails — The authors may not put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Data gathered by using functional MRI techniques indicate that adult bilinguals who acquire both languages early in life activate overlapping regions of the brain when processing the two languages, whereas those who learn the second language later in life activate two distinct regions of the brain for the two languages (114).”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [114] Kim K H S, Relkin N R, Lee K M, Hirsch J. Nature (London) 1997;388:172–174. doi: 10.1038/40623. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
hedgedcorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Early in life, interference effects are minimal and two different mappings can be acquired, as is the case for infants learning two languages.”
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“New training studies suggest that exaggerating the dimensions of foreign language contrasts (36), as well as providing listeners with multiple instances spoken by many talkers (113), are effective training methods.”
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [36] McClelland J L, Thomas A, McCandliss B D, Fiez J A. In: Brain, Behavioral, and Cognitive Disorders: The Neurocomputational Perspective. Reggia J, Ruppin E, Glanzman D, editors. Oxford: Elsevier; 1999. pp. 75–80. [Google Scholar] source
- Not checked yetcites [113] Pisoni D B. In: Speech Perception, Production and Linguistic Structure. Tohkura Y, Vatikiotis-Bateson E, Sagisaka Y, editors. Tokyo: Ohmsha; 1992. pp. 143–151. [Google Scholar]
hedgeddirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Exaggerating speech not only makes it more discriminable for infants, it highlights critical parameters used in the native language.”
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“The learning strategies used by infants may themselves have influenced the nature of language, in much the same way that general auditory processing influenced the selection of phonetic units for language during its evolution.”
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. It may be too vague to check against evidence. The paper may give no reason why it holds.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Infants are neither the tabula rasas that Skinner described nor the innate grammarians that Chomsky envisioned.”
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“(iv) vocal imitation links speech perception and production early, and auditory, visual, and motor information are coregistered for speech categories;”
plaincorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“(v) adults addressing infants unconsciously alter their speech to match infants' learning strategies, and this is instrumental in supporting infants' initial mapping of speech;”
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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Probably not a substantial claim. The paper may give no reason why it holds. It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Language is thus innately discoverable, but not innate in the way that selectionist models suggested.”
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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The paper relies on this without support.
Infants' performance in laboratory speech perception tasks reflects the mechanisms underlying natural language acquisition.
“The data show that infants perceptually “map” critical aspects of ambient language in the first year of life before they can speak.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Listening preferences in infancy indicate language-specific learning.
“American infants tested at 6 months show no listening preference for words with the strong/weak as opposed to the weak/strong pattern, but by 9 months they exhibit a strong preference for the pattern typical of their native language (55).”
The paper relies on this without support.
The statistical learning demonstrated with artificial speech stimuli generalizes to natural language acquisition.
“New research shows that infants detect and exploit the statistical properties of the language they hear to find word candidates in running speech before they know the meanings of words.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Children learn language more naturally and efficiently than adults.
“There is no doubt that children learn language more naturally and efficiently than adults, a paradox given adults' superior cognitive skills.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Infants exposed to two languages do much better if each parent speaks one of the two languages, rather than both parents speaking both languages.
“Anecdotal evidence suggests that infants exposed to two languages do much better if each parent speaks one of the two languages, rather than both parents speaking both languages.”
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“Humans are easily able to acquire huge amounts of biologically primary knowledge outside of educational contexts and without a discernible working memory load.”
From An Evolutionary Upgrade of Cognitive Load Theory: Using the Human Motor System and Collaboration to Support the Learning of Complex Cognitive Tasks (2012) · cites this paper as Kuhl 2000
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§ References
“94.Meltzoff A N, Moore M K. Early Dev Parent. 1977;6:179–192.”
§ References
“doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-0917(199709/12)6:3/4<179::AID-EDP157>3.0.CO;2-R.”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Kuhl, P. K.
- Affiliations
- University of Washington (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kuhl, Patricia K.
- ORCID
- Kuhl, Patricia K.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2000-10-24
- Volume
- 97
- Issue
- 22
- Pages
- 11850-11857
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC34178
- OpenAlex
- W1972159947
- Semantic Scholar
- 4ea6e708012a19bcd4674f1607fd1e1a03b93eaf
- Cited by
- 773
- References
- 121
- Citations by year
- 2026: 12 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 36 · 2022: 31 · 2021: 45 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 34 · 2018: 45 · 2017: 34 · 2016: 31 · 2015: 53 · 2014: 32 · 2013: 30 · 2012: 34
- FWCI
- 42.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (HD 37954)
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD037954, HD37954)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Keywords
- language acquisition, infant speech perception, statistical learning, perceptual mapping, language experience, language bootstrapping, infant language development
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Haplorhini, Humans, Infant, Language Development
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-10-10, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).
A second model labelled each claim on 2026-10-10 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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