Rule learning by seven-month-old infants
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Updated: Oct 26, 2026

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
G F Marcus1, S Vijayan, S Bandi Rao
1Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA. gary.marcus@nyu.edu
Abstract:
A fundamental task of language acquisition is to extract abstract algebraic rules. Three experiments show that 7-month-old infants attend longer to sentences with unfamiliar structures than to sentences with familiar structures. The design of the artificial language task used in these experiments ensured that this discrimination could not be performed by counting, by a system that is sensitive only to transitional probabilities, or by a popular class of simple neural network models. Instead, these results suggest that infants can represent, extract, and generalize abstract algebraic rules.
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