Units of Information in the Acquisition of Language

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Abstract
The child learns language in melodic units called tone groups, which are units of information. The focus of what the speaker wishes to convey to the listener is found in the tonic. All child speech during the holophrastic period, and much adult speech later on, takes the form of telegraphic ellipsis, which relies on the non-language environment to explain the tonic. The development of language round the tonic is possible because the tonic can shift from place to place in the same sequence of words, depending on the information focus. This acts as the " inducer " of language growth. Nuclear linguistic structures are made perceptually prominent in the context of what is being attended to by the speaker and the listener.