Rule learning by seven-month-old infants

G. F. Marcus, S. Vijayan, S. Bandi Rao, P. M. Vishton

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)77-80
Number of pages4
JournalScience
Volume283
Issue number5398
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 1999

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General

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