CNRS and Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France.
J Child Lang. 2013 Sep;40(4):860-72. doi: 10.1017/S0305000912000256. Epub 2012 Aug 6.
One important mechanism suggested to underlie the acquisition of grammar is rule learning. Indeed, infants aged 0 ; 7 are able to learn rules based on simple identity relations (adjacent repetitions, ABB: "wo fe fe" and non-adjacent repetitions, ABA: "wo fe wo", respectively; Marcus et al., 1999). One unexplored issue is whether young infants are able to process both adjacent and non-adjacent repetitions. As the previous studies always compared the two types of repetition structures directly, the ability to learn only one of them was sufficient for successful discrimination in these tasks. The present study reports two experiments, in which we test the ability of infants aged 0 ; 7 to discriminate adjacent and non-adjacent repetition structures against random controls (ABB vs. ABC and ABA vs. ABC). We show that, contrary to some previous proposals, infants aged 0 ; 7 successfully discriminate both repetition types from random controls, but show no spontaneous preference for either of them.
一个被认为是语法习得基础的重要机制是规则学习。事实上，0-7 个月大的婴儿能够基于简单的同一性关系学习规则（相邻重复，ABB：“wo fe fe”和非相邻重复，ABA：“wo fe wo”；Marcus 等人，1999）。一个尚未探究的问题是，幼儿是否能够处理相邻和非相邻重复。由于之前的研究总是直接比较这两种重复结构，因此在这些任务中，仅学习其中一种就足以成功区分。本研究报告了两项实验，我们在其中测试了 0-7 个月大的婴儿区分相邻和非相邻重复结构与随机控制（ABB 与 ABC 和 ABA 与 ABC）的能力。我们表明，与一些先前的建议相反，0-7 个月大的婴儿能够成功地区分重复类型与随机控制，但对它们没有自发的偏好。
