Innately curious

from New Scientist Jan. 21-27, 2012
p 27 "Innately curious"

"over the last 10 years we have started to see powerful evidence that children might learn language statistically, by unconsciously tabulating patterns in the sentences they hear and using them to generalize to new cases. Children might learn language effortlessly not because they possess innate grammatical rules, but because statistical learning is something we all do incessantly and automatically. The brain is designed to pick up on patterns of all kinds."

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