Susan Goldin-Meadow, Inbal Arnon, Whole-to-part development in language creation, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 29, Issue 1, 2025, Pages 12-14, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2024.09.015.
Children approach language by learning parts and constructing wholes. But they can also first learn wholes and then discover parts. We demonstrate this understudied yet impactful process in children creating language without input. Whole-to-part learning thus need not be driven by hard-to-segment input and is a bias that children bring to language.