ERIC Number: EJ994819
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Feb
Pages: 10
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0090-6905
EISSN: N/A
Abstract Rule Learning in 11- and 14-Month-Old Infants
Koulaguina, Elena; Shi, Rushen
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, v42 n1 p71-80 Feb 2013
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.
Descriptors: Evidence, Syntax, Generalization, Language Acquisition, Infants, Sentences, Word Order, Psycholinguistics, Hypothesis Testing, Russian, Phonology, Morphology (Languages), Cues, Language Research
Springer. 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013. Tel: 800-777-4643; Tel: 212-460-1500; Fax: 212-348-4505; e-mail: service-ny@springer.com; Web site: http://www.springerlink.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A