%A de Diego-Balaguer,Ruth %A Martinez-Alvarez,Anna %A Pons,Ferran %D 2016 %J Frontiers in Psychology %C %F %G English %K Infancy,Attention,Temporal orienting,statistical learning,rule learning,morphosyntactic development,word learning,segmentation,language development %Q %R 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00044 %W %L %M %P %7 %8 2016-February-02 %9 Hypothesis and Theory %+ Prof Ruth de Diego-Balaguer,Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats,Barcelona, Spain,ruth.dediego@ub.edu %+ Prof Ruth de Diego-Balaguer,Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Institut d’Investigació Biomèdica de Bellvitge,Barcelona, Spain,ruth.dediego@ub.edu %+ Prof Ruth de Diego-Balaguer,Department of Basic Psychology, University of Barcelona,Barcelona, Spain,ruth.dediego@ub.edu %# %! Attention and Language Development %* %< %T Temporal Attention as a Scaffold for Language Development %U https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00044 %V 7 %0 JOURNAL ARTICLE %@ 1664-1078 %X Language is one of the most fascinating abilities that humans possess. Infants demonstrate an amazing repertoire of linguistic abilities from very early on and reach an adult-like form incredibly fast. However, language is not acquired all at once but in an incremental fashion. In this article we propose that the attentional system may be one of the sources for this developmental trajectory in language acquisition. At birth, infants are endowed with an attentional system fully driven by salient stimuli in their environment, such as prosodic information (e.g., rhythm or pitch). Early stages of language acquisition could benefit from this readily available, stimulus-driven attention to simplify the complex speech input and allow word segmentation. At later stages of development, infants are progressively able to selectively attend to specific elements while disregarding others. This attentional ability could allow them to learn distant non-adjacent rules needed for morphosyntactic acquisition. Because non-adjacent dependencies occur at distant moments in time, learning these dependencies may require correctly orienting attention in the temporal domain. Here, we gather evidence uncovering the intimate relationship between the development of attention and language. We aim to provide a novel approach to human development, bridging together temporal attention and language acquisition.