Knowledge Bank

In language acquisition theory a crucial question centers on the degree of innate specialization for language learning. Over the past decade the importance of the ability to extract statistical information in both linguistic and non-linguistic domains has received considerable attention among linguists and cognitive scientists (Aslin et al. 1998; Saffran et al. 1996; Kirkham et al. 2002). It is also well known that language acquisition must involve more than just extracting co-occurrence frequencies between items. Marcus et al. (1999) propose that there is also a mechanism designed to extract abstract, “algebraic” rules from linguistic data, though to date there has been no published studies examining this mechanism in non-linguistic domains. This study sought to replicate the findings of Marcus et al. with non-linguistic auditory and visual input. Results from three experiments show that 8-month-old infants are able to learn such rules from both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. This is taken as evidence that a rule abstraction mechanism of the kind proposed by Marcus et al. is part of the larger repertoire of domain-general learning mechanisms.

Advisors: Peter Culicover and Vladimir Sloutsky