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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Sep 28, 2025

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

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

Published on: May 15, 2019

Preverbal infants' sensitivity to grammatical dependencies.

Mireille Babineau¹, Anne Christophe^2,3

¹Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies

|March 30, 2022

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Infants as young as 8 months can detect grammatical patterns between word types, like determiners and nouns. This early language skill helps them learn new words and their meanings.

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Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Infants distinguish function words (pronouns, determiners) from content words (verbs, nouns) early in life.
Limited research exists on preverbal infants' understanding of grammatical relationships between word categories.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if French-learning 8- and 11-month-old infants can track grammatical dependencies.
Specifically, to examine sensitivity to determiner-noun and pronoun-verb co-occurrences.

Main Methods:

Utilized the Visual Fixation Procedure with French-learning infants.
Presented infants with lists of grammatical and ungrammatical word sequences.
Conducted two experiments with varying noun and verb usage.

Main Results:

Eleven-month-olds consistently preferred grammatical word sequences over ungrammatical ones.
Eight-month-olds showed a developing trend towards preferring grammatical sequences.
Both experiments yielded similar results regarding infants' sensitivity to word co-occurrence.

Conclusions:

Infants under one year old possess sophisticated word storage and access abilities, enabling tracking of grammatical dependencies.
Early sensitivity to word co-occurrence patterns aids in lexical access and learning word properties.