Abstract Rule Learning in 11- and 14-Month-Old Infants |
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Authors: | Elena Koulaguina Rushen Shi |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Psychology, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montreal, QC, H3C 3P8, Canada
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Abstract: | This study tests the hypothesis that distributional information can guide infants in the generalization of word order movement rules at the initial stage of language acquisition. Participants were 11- and 14-month-old infants. Stimuli were sentences in Russian, a language that was unknown to our infants. During training the word order of each sentence was transformed following a consistent pattern (e.g., ABC–BAC). During the test phase infants heard novel sentences that respected the trained rule and ones that violated the trained rule (i.e., a different transformation such as ABC–ACB). Stimuli words had highly variable phonological and morphological shapes. The cue available was the positional information of words and their non-adjacent relations across sentences. We found that 14-month-olds, but not 11-month-olds, showed evidence of abstract rule generalization to novel instances. The implications of this finding to early syntactic acquisition are discussed. |
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