I will present recent research on two separate topics that suggests human infants use a combination of both evolutionary old and new cognitive tools to tackle the task of language acquisition. Research on the principles that guide how humans and non-human animals group sequences of sounds has shown that we share with other species perceptual biases that we apply to linguistic stimuli. On the contrary, research on processing differences between consonants and vowels suggests humans, but not other animals, benefit from a “division of labor” across phonological representations. This division would help to extract regularities from the speech signal and facilitate language learning. The studies I will present provide
support to the idea that perceptual biases together with language-specific representations guide the discovery of linguistic structures.