Communicative signals promote abstract rule learning by 7-month-old infants
نویسندگان
چکیده
Infants’ ability to detect patterns in speech input is central to their acquisition of language, and recent evidence suggests that their cognitive faculties may be specifically tailored to this task: Seven-month-olds reliably abstract rule-like structures (e.g., ABB vs. ABA) from speech, but not other stimuli. Here we ask what drives this speech advantage. Specifically, we propose that infants’ learning from speech is driven by their representation of speech as a communicative signal. As evidence for this claim, we report an experiment in which 7-month-old infants (N=28) learned rules from a novel sound (sine-wave tones) introduced as a communicative signal, but failed to learn the same rules from tones presented in non-communicative contexts. These findings highlight the powerful influence of social-communicative contexts on infants’ learning.
منابع مشابه
Communicative signals support abstract rule learning by 7-month-old infants.
The mechanisms underlying the discovery of abstract rules like those found in natural language may be evolutionarily tuned to speech, according to previous research. When infants hear speech sounds, they can learn rules that govern their combination, but when they hear non-speech sounds such as sine-wave tones, they fail to do so. Here we show that infants' rule learning is not tied to speech p...
متن کاملInfant Rule Learning: Advantage Language, or Advantage Speech?
Infants appear to learn abstract rule-like regularities (e.g., la la da follows an AAB pattern) more easily from speech than from a variety of other auditory and visual stimuli (Marcus et al., 2007). We test if that facilitation reflects a specialization to learn from speech alone, or from modality-independent communicative stimuli more generally, by measuring 7.5-month-old infants' ability to ...
متن کاملRule learning by seven-month-old infants.
A fundamental task of language acquisition is to extract abstract algebraic rules. Three experiments show that 7-month-old infants attend longer to sentences with unfamiliar structures than to sentences with familiar structures. The design of the artificial language task used in these experiments ensured that this discrimination could not be performed by counting, by a system that is sensitive ...
متن کاملVisual abstract rule learning by 3- and 4-month-old infants
Infants’ ability to detect and generalize abstract rules (e.g., ABB, ABA) in auditory stimuli has been well documented, however their ability to do so from visual stimuli has received considerably less attention. Moreover, the few studies reported suggest that this kind of learning is especially sensitive to details of the experimental design. Here, we focus on 3to 4-month-old infants (N=40) to...
متن کاملWhat the [beep]? Six-month-olds link novel communicative signals to meaning.
Over the first year, infants tune into the signals of their native language and begin to link them to meaning. Here, we ask whether infants, like adults, can also infer the communicative function of otherwise arbitrary signals (here, tone sequences) and link these to meaning as well. We examined 6-month-olds' object categorization in the context of sine-wave tones, a signal that fails to suppor...
متن کامل