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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

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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.
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Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 20, 2026

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
05:35

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Infant rule learning: advantage language, or advantage speech?

Hugh Rabagliati1, Ann Senghas, Scott Johnson

  • 1Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America. hugh@wjh.harvard.edu

Plos One
|July 21, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Infants learn abstract rules from speech more easily than other stimuli. Research shows 7.5-month-olds learning sign language-like gestures struggled with AAB patterns, suggesting speech-specific learning.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Development
  • Infant Learning
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Infants exhibit a remarkable ability to learn abstract, rule-like patterns from spoken language.
  • Previous research indicates this learning is more efficient with speech compared to other sensory inputs.
  • The extent to which this facilitation is specific to speech or generalizes to other communicative modalities remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether the speech-facilitation effect in infant rule learning extends to sign language-like gestures.
  • To determine if infants' abstract rule learning is specialized for speech or a broader category of communicative stimuli.
  • To compare infant learning of abstract rules from visual-gestural stimuli with established findings from auditory speech stimuli.

Main Methods:

  • 7.5-month-old hearing infants were exposed to sign language-like gestures.
  • Infants' ability to learn abstract rules (specifically AAB and ABB patterns) from these gestures was assessed.
  • Experimental conditions were designed to be comparable to previous studies on infant speech learning.

Main Results:

  • Infants successfully learned an ABB rule from the sign-like gestures.
  • However, infants did not demonstrate learning of an AAB rule from the same stimuli.
  • These findings align with previous observations of reduced rule learning from non-speech stimuli.

Conclusions:

  • The results suggest that the facilitation of abstract rule learning observed with speech may be specific to the auditory-linguistic modality.
  • Infant rule learning from non-speech, communicative gestures appears to be less robust than from spoken language.
  • This indicates a potential specialization in early language acquisition for processing speech-based regularities.