Structuring linguistic noise

How do young children acquiring their native language master complex abstract properties of adult sentences, more specifically, their syntactic structure? A good portion of recent research in child language acquisition is devoted to the nature of 'segmentation' strategies allowing children to deduce some of these abstract structural properties from the linguistic input they are exposed to, and the role of linguistic (e.g. prosodic), cognitive (e.g. working memory, probabilistic) and experience (e.g. bilingualism, music training) factors that affect the segmentation task. In this talk I give a broad outline of this research agenda including our own work and reflect on promising new directions that emerge in this domain.