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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

Language Development

Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
The Nativist Approach01:21

The Nativist Approach

The nativist approach to infant cognitive development proposes that infants are born with inherent knowledge structures that allow them to interpret the world almost immediately. This perspective contrasts with earlier developmental theories, such as those proposed by Jean Piaget, which emphasized a more gradual acquisition of cognitive abilities through interaction with the environment. One key concept in this approach is object permanence — the understanding that objects continue to exist...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 4, 2026

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm
06:07

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Published on: May 15, 2019

Young German children's early syntactic competence: a preferential looking study.

Miriam Dittmar1, Kirsten Abbot-Smith, Elena Lieven

  • 1Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, and Institute of Psychology, University of Zurich, Switzerland. m.dittmar@psychologie.uzh.ch

Developmental Science
|June 26, 2008
PubMed
Summary

Young German children demonstrated syntactic understanding of transitive word order, but only after specific linguistic training. This suggests early language development requires relevant prior experience for abstract concept acquisition.

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Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Early language acquisition involves understanding grammatical structures.
  • Previous research indicated 21-month-old English children grasp abstract syntactic rules.
  • The current study investigates this in German-speaking children.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To determine if 21-month-old German children understand transitive word order abstractly.
  • To explore the role of immediate linguistic experience in early syntactic comprehension.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a preferential looking methodology adapted from Gertner et al. (2006).
  • Two groups of German children received different training phases before testing.
  • Training included either full transitive sentences or familiar verbs only.

Main Results:

  • Only the group trained on full transitive sentences (verbs and nouns) succeeded.
  • Children trained only on familiar verbs did not show syntactic understanding.
  • Success was contingent on specific, relevant linguistic input prior to testing.

Conclusions:

  • Young children's syntactic understanding may depend on immediate, relevant linguistic experience.
  • This challenges the notion of purely abstract, decontextualized syntactic knowledge at this age.
  • Raises questions about the nature and flexibility of early linguistic representations.