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Eighteen-month-old infants represent nonlocal syntactic dependencies.

Laurel Perkins1, Jeffrey Lidz2

  • 1Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095; perkinsl@ucla.edu.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|October 5, 2021
PubMed
Summary

Eighteen-month-old infants can grasp abstract syntax, specifically nonlocal dependencies in English wh-questions. This suggests core syntactic abilities emerge early in human cognitive development.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Human language relies on syntax, a system for combining linguistic elements to create complex sentences.
  • Syntax enables potentially unbounded dependencies over abstract structures, crucial for language expressiveness.
  • The developmental trajectory of syntactic abilities, particularly abstract representations, remains an active area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether infants can represent abstract nonlocal syntactic dependencies.
  • To determine the age at which infants develop an awareness of complementary distribution patterns in syntax.
  • To probe infants' underlying syntactic representations independently of semantic interpretation.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized English wh-questions as a test case to examine nonlocal dependencies.
  • Designed a novel test to assess infants' knowledge of argument structure constraints, specifically the complementary distribution of wh-phrases and local objects.
  • Compared the performance of 18-month-old infants with younger infants on this syntactic representation task.

Main Results:

  • 18-month-old infants demonstrated awareness of the complementary distribution pattern in wh-questions.
  • Infants in this age group successfully represented the nonlocal grammatical dependency between the wh-phrase and the verb.
  • Younger infants did not exhibit this understanding, indicating a developmental shift.

Conclusions:

  • A core property of syntax, the ability to represent abstract nonlocal dependencies, emerges early in human development.
  • The second year of life is a critical period for syntactic development, marked by the emergence of computational capacities for complex structures.
  • Infants possess sophisticated syntactic knowledge even before mastering complex linguistic interpretations.