Language is an extremely complex system, which is continuously subject to change. Despite this complexity and a vast amount of variation, children learn their mother tongue quickly and efficiently. The challenge is to discover how children learn the structure of language, what aspects of language they store language in their brain, and how this developmentally affects their use of language.
The research of the First Language Acquisition programme is on the acquisition of phonological representations in the lexicon, the role of these representations in perception and production, and their interaction with morphosyntax. Phonological representations mediate between the acoustic signal and meaning in speech perception and between meaning and the articulatory output in speech production. Thus, these representations lay the foundation for successful communication. Yet, the nature of phonological representations that are built up during language acquisition and the mechanisms behind that are far from clear.
