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Learning non-adjacent regularities at 7 months

Cambridge University Press

One important mechanism suggested to underlie the acquisition of grammar is rule learning. Indeed, 7-month-old infants are able to learn rules based on simple identity relations (adjacent repetitions, ABB: “wo fe fe” and non-adjacent repetitions, ABA: “wo fe wo”, respectively; Marcus et al., 1999). One unexplored issue is whether young infants are able to process both adjacent and non-adjacent repetitions. As the previous studies always compared the two types of repetition structures directly, the ability to learn only one of them was sufficient for successful discrimination in these tasks. The present study reports two experiments, in which we test 7-month-old infants’ ability to discriminate adjacent and non-adjacent repetition structures against random controls (ABB vs. ABC and ABA vs. ABC). We show that contrary to previous proposals, 7-month-old infants show no spontaneous preference for either repetition type over random sequences, but, crucially, they successfully discriminate both of them from random controls.

Text

2019-12-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/72995

Gervain, J., & Werker, J.F. (2013). Learning non-adjacent regularities at 0;7. Journal of Child Language, 40(4), 860-872.

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/