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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...
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Observational Learning

Albert Bandura's observational learning, also known as imitation or modeling, occurs when a person observes and imitates another's behavior. It is a quicker process than operant conditioning. A well-known example is the Bobo doll study, where children who saw an adult acting aggressively towards the doll were more likely to act aggressively when left alone, compared to those who observed a nonaggressive adult. Many psychologists view observational learning as a form of latent learning because...
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Learning is the process of acquiring knowledge or skills through practice or experience, leading to long-lasting behavioral changes. This acquisition occurs through interaction with the environment and requires practice or experience. For instance, mastering a skill such as surfing requires considerable practice and experience, highlighting the essential role of repeated interactions with the environment in learning.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 29, 2026

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms
07:31

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Initial morphological learning in preverbal infants.

Alexandra Marquis1, Rushen Shi

  • 1Département de psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3P8.

Cognition
|September 23, 2011
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Infants learn word endings (morphemes) early by noticing frequent patterns, even before speaking. This helps them understand new words with similar structures, demonstrating frequency-based morphological learning.

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Related Experiment Videos

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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
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Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm
06:07

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

Published on: May 15, 2019

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Children's acquisition of inflected word structures is crucial for language development.
  • The role of frequent, bound functional morphemes in early word learning remains under investigation.
  • Understanding how infants process morphological alternations informs theories of language acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how infants learn the internal structure of inflected words.
  • To test the hypothesis that frequent morphemes are encoded at the preverbal stage.
  • To determine if infants use learned morphemes to interpret novel words.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a preferential looking procedure with French-learning 11-month-olds.
  • Presented frequent French functor /e/ and its variants.
  • Conducted an artificial language experiment with a novel suffix and pseudo-roots, followed by a training phase.

Main Results:

  • Infants encoded the frequent French functor /e/ and recognized relatedness between bare roots and inflected forms.
  • Infants successfully learned an artificial suffix during a brief training phase.
  • Learned artificial suffixes were used to interpret novel affixed words not encountered during training.

Conclusions:

  • Initial learning of sub-lexical functors and morphological alternations is driven by frequency.
  • Infants utilize frequent morphemes to interpret other words with similar inflections.
  • Morphological learning can occur without relying on semantic understanding.