title: Abstract rule learning in 11- and 14-month-old infants.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montreal, QC, H3C 3P8, Canada.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Koulaguina
authors.forename: Rushen
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Shi
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005793:Generalization, Psychological / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics