Infants’ Learning of Rule-Based Visual Sequences Predicts Language Outcome at 2 Years

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Roberta Bettoni¹  Valentina Riva³  Chiara Cantiani³  Massimo Molteni³  Viola Macchi Cassia¹  Hermann Bulf¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca;Milan Center for Neuroscience;Child Psychopathology Unit, Scientific Institute

关键词: infants;    language development;    implicit learning;    rule learning;    syntax;    lexicon;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00281

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The ability to learn and generalize abstract rules from sensory input – i.e., Rule Learning (RL) – is seen as pivotal to language development, and specifically to the acquisition of the grammatical structure of language. Although many studies have shown that RL in infancy is operating across different perceptual domains, including vision, no studies have directly investigated the link between infants’ visual RL and later language acquisition. Here, we conducted a longitudinal study to investigate whether 7-month-olds’ ability to detect visual structural regularities predicts linguistic outcome at 2 years of age. At 7 months, infants were tested for their ability to extract and generalize ABB and ABA structures from sequences of visual shapes, and at 24 months their lexical and grammatical skills were assessed using the MacArthur-Bates CDI. Regression analyses showed that infants’ visual RL abilities selectively predicted early grammatical abilities, but not lexical abilities. These results may provide the first evidence that RL mechanisms are involved in language acquisition, and suggest that RL abilities may act as an early neurocognitive marker for language impairments.

【 授权许可】

CC BY