Toddlers track hierarchical structure dependence

Shi, Rushen; Legrand, Camille; Brandenberger, Anna M.

doi:10.1080/10489223.2020.1776010

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Starting from the simplest and most perceptually available components of this input (i.e., sounds in spoken languages; handshapes and movements in sign languages), infants arrive at the richer and more abstract components of language (e.g., grammars), which permit generalization beyond the input that has been received. Yet, there is still substantial debate regarding innate knowledge about language (for a range of recent perspectives, see Christiansen & Chater, 2015; Lasnik & Lidz, 2016; Linzen & Baroni, 2021; Pearl, 2021; Perfors, Tenenbaum, & Regier, 2011; Shi, Legrand, & Brandenberger, 2020). Regardless of one's stance in this debate, infants are faced with complex learning problems, including learning idiosyncrasies of a specific language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring Complex Communicative Systems: Statistical Learning of Language and Emotion

Ruba

Pollak

Saffran

2022

Topics in Cognitive Science

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During the early postnatal years, most infants rapidly learn to understand two naturally evolved communication systems: language and emotion. While these two domains include different types of content knowledge, it is possible that similar learning processes subserve their acquisition. In this review, we compare the learnable statistical regularities in language and emotion input. We then consider how domain-general learning abilities may underly the acquisition of language and emotion, and how this process may be constrained in each domain. This comparative developmental approach can advance our understanding of how humans learn to communicate with others.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring Complex Communicative Systems: Statistical Learning of Language and Emotion

Ruba

Pollak

Saffran

2022

Topics in Cognitive Science

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“…First, given the general tendency for comprehension to precede production in language acquisition, we suspected that infants might represent wh -questions as such in the months leading up to their first production of these questions, around 20 mo of age ( 29 , 30 ). Second, the listening preference procedure has been used successfully with infants in a wide age range, from 8 to 30 mo, and is well-suited to the behavioral capacities of infants at 18 mo and younger ( 28 , 32 , 38 ). One group of infants ( n = 16) heard sentences like v , and the other group ( n = 16) heard sentences like vi .…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eighteen-month-old infants represent nonlocal syntactic dependencies

Perkins

Lidz

2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The human ability to produce and understand an indefinite number of sentences is driven by syntax, a cognitive system that can combine a finite number of primitive linguistic elements to build arbitrarily complex expressions. The expressive power of syntax comes in part from its ability to encode potentially unbounded dependencies over abstract structural configurations. How does such a system develop in human minds? We show that 18-mo-old infants are capable of representing abstract nonlocal dependencies, suggesting that a core property of syntax emerges early in development. Our test case is English wh-questions, in which a fronted wh-phrase can act as the argument of a verb at a distance (e.g., What did the chef burn?). Whereas prior work has focused on infants’ interpretations of these questions, we introduce a test to probe their underlying syntactic representations, independent of meaning. We ask when infants know that an object wh-phrase and a local object of a verb cannot co-occur because they both express the same argument relation (e.g., *What did the chef burn the pizza). We find that 1) 18 mo olds demonstrate awareness of this complementary distribution pattern and thus represent the nonlocal grammatical dependency between the wh-phrase and the verb, but 2) younger infants do not. These results suggest that the second year of life is a period of active syntactic development, during which the computational capacities for representing nonlocal syntactic dependencies become evident.

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“…However, the difficulty of using hierarchical reasoning may be due to other reasons such as ordinal reasoning (a linear cognitive mechanism) being more primitive compared to complex, abstract hierarchical reasoning. Ordinal reasoning involves “linear” (Coopmans, De Hoop, Kaushik, Hagoort, & Martin, 2022; Shi, Emond, & Badri, 2020) or “flat” (Matthei, 1982) mental representations. On the contrary, hierarchical reasoning relies on two or more dimensions of mental representations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Recursive Pattern Processing in Human Adults

2023

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The capacity to generate recursive sequences is a marker of rich, algorithmic cognition, and perhaps unique to humans. Yet, the precise processes driving recursive sequence generation remain mysterious. We investigated three potential cognitive mechanisms underlying recursive pattern processing: hierarchical reasoning, ordinal reasoning, and associative chaining. We developed a Bayesian mixture model to quantify the extent to which these three cognitive mechanisms contribute to adult humans’ performance in a sequence generation task. We further tested whether recursive rule discovery depends upon relational information, either perceptual or semantic. We found that the presence of relational information facilitates hierarchical reasoning and drives the generation of recursive sequences across novel depths of center embedding. In the absence of relational information, the use of ordinal reasoning predominates. Our results suggest that hierarchical reasoning is an important cognitive mechanism underlying recursive pattern processing and can be deployed across embedding depths and relational domains.

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Toddlers track hierarchical structure dependence

Cited by 12 publications

References 37 publications

Acquiring Complex Communicative Systems: Statistical Learning of Language and Emotion

Acquiring Complex Communicative Systems: Statistical Learning of Language and Emotion

Eighteen-month-old infants represent nonlocal syntactic dependencies

Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Recursive Pattern Processing in Human Adults

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