Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Nine-month-olds extract structural principles required for natural language.

LouAnn Gerken1

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. gerken@u.arizona.edu

Cognition
|June 5, 2004
PubMed
Summary

Infants can quickly learn structural rules in artificial languages, similar to natural language. This suggests humans possess an innate ability to extract linguistic patterns from early exposure.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

A developmental account of the role of sequential dependencies in typical and atypical language learners.

Cognitive neuropsychology·2023
Same author

Not All Procedural Learning Tasks Are Difficult for Adults With Developmental Language Disorder.

Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR·2021
Same author

Infants' discrimination of consonant contrasts in the presence and absence of talker variability.

Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies·2020
Same author

The Distribution of Talker Variability Impacts Infants' Word Learning.

Laboratory phonology·2020
Same author

An alternative to the procedural∼declarative memory account of developmental language disorder.

Journal of communication disorders·2019
Same author

Experience with morphosyntactic paradigms allows toddlers to tacitly anticipate overregularized verb forms months before they produce them.

Cognition·2019

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Infant language acquisition is often studied through their ability to learn structural properties of language-like systems.
  • Previous research focused on properties not central to natural language, limiting understanding of innate linguistic capabilities.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if infants can extract linguistic structural information beyond simple properties.
  • To determine if infants generalize learning from familiarization to new patterns adhering to natural language constraints.

Main Methods:

  • Infants were exposed to artificial languages with 3- and 5-syllable words.
  • These languages incorporated stress assignment constraints mirroring those in natural languages.
  • Generalization was tested by exposing infants to new patterns within the same constraint system.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Infants demonstrated the ability to generalize stress patterns beyond those explicitly encountered during familiarization.
  • This generalization reflected the underlying stress assignment constraints of the artificial languages.
  • The findings indicate a sophisticated level of pattern extraction by infants.

Conclusions:

  • Infants possess a rapid ability to extract complex structural information relevant to human language.
  • This capacity supports the hypothesis of innate mechanisms for language acquisition.
  • Early learning extends to abstract linguistic rules, not just surface-level properties.