Flutterby™! : learning language

Via Edgecase, language learning more pattern based than currently trendy:

"The thinking for years had been that something as complex as language could not be acquired with fairly simple learning mechanisms that rely on word frequency, associations between adjacent words, and other statistical phenomena," says Rebecca Gomez, a presenter at the panel and an assistant professor of psychology in The Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University. "But we now have new methods for assessing learning in infants, and we've been able to demonstrate that this type of learning is in fact very strong."