TY - GEN
T1 - Communicative signals promote abstract rule learning by 7-month-old infants
AU - Ferguson, Brock
AU - Lew-Williams, Casey
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014. All rights reserved.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Infants' ability to detect patterns in speech input is central to their acquisition of language, and recent evidence suggests that their cognitive faculties may be specifically tailored to this task: Seven-month-olds reliably abstract rule-like structures (e.g., ABB vs. ABA) from speech, but not other stimuli. Here we ask what drives this speech advantage. Specifically, we propose that infants' learning from speech is driven by their representation of speech as a communicative signal. As evidence for this claim, we report an experiment in which 7-month-old infants (N=28) learned rules from a novel sound (sine-wave tones) introduced as a communicative signal, but failed to learn the same rules from tones presented in non-communicative contexts. These findings highlight the powerful influence of social-communicative contexts on infants' learning.
AB - Infants' ability to detect patterns in speech input is central to their acquisition of language, and recent evidence suggests that their cognitive faculties may be specifically tailored to this task: Seven-month-olds reliably abstract rule-like structures (e.g., ABB vs. ABA) from speech, but not other stimuli. Here we ask what drives this speech advantage. Specifically, we propose that infants' learning from speech is driven by their representation of speech as a communicative signal. As evidence for this claim, we report an experiment in which 7-month-old infants (N=28) learned rules from a novel sound (sine-wave tones) introduced as a communicative signal, but failed to learn the same rules from tones presented in non-communicative contexts. These findings highlight the powerful influence of social-communicative contexts on infants' learning.
KW - abstract rule learning
KW - grammar
KW - infants
KW - language development
KW - social cognition
KW - statistical learning
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84943191979
T3 - Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
SP - 2192
EP - 2197
BT - Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
Y2 - 23 July 2014 through 26 July 2014
ER -