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The programme First Language Acquisition investigates the acquisition of phonological representations in the lexicon and the role of these representations in perception and production.

Phonological representations mediate between the acoustic signal and meaning in speech perception and between meaning and the articulatory output in speech production. Thus, phonological representations in the brain lay the foundation for successful communication. Yet, the nature of phonological representations that are built up during language acquisition is far from clear.

Language is an extremely complex system, which is continuously subject to change. Despite the complexity and the vast amount of variation, children learn their mother tongue quickly and efficiently. Psychologists have offered an impressive number of functional explanations for this fact. Neurologists are discovering more about the structure of the human brain every day.

Nevertheless, the structure of language remains largely invisible and can only be studied indirectly. It is ultimately the job of linguists to discover how language is structured and how it is stored in the brain. One way of doing this is to investigate children’s ability to discover the structure of language from the input that they receive and to build lexical representations in their minds in such a way that they are efficient for both the perception and the production of spoken language.