Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
NeuroMi, Milan Center for Neuroscience, Milan, Italy.
Infancy. 2021 Mar;26(2):319-326. doi: 10.1111/infa.12384. Epub 2021 Jan 13.
Tracking adjacent (AD) and non-adjacent (NAD) dependencies in a sequence of elements is critical for the development of many complex abilities, such as language acquisition and social interaction. While learning of AD in infancy is a domain-general ability that is functioning across different domains, infants' processing of NAD has been reported only for speech sequences. Here, we tested 9- to 12- and 13- to 15-month-olds' ability to extract AxB grammars in visual sequences of unfamiliar elements. Infants were habituated to a series of 3-visual arrays following an AxB grammar in which the first element (A) predicted the third element (B), while intervening X elements changed continuously. Following habituation, infants were tested with 3-item arrays in which initial and final positions were switched (novel) or kept consistent with the habituation phase (familiar). Older infants successfully recognized the familiar AxB grammar at test, whereas the younger group showed some sensitivity to extract to NAD, albeit in a less robust form. This finding provides the first evidence that the ability to track NAD is a domain-general ability that is present also in the visual domain and that the sensitivity to such dependencies is related to developmental changes, as demonstrated in the auditory domain.
追踪元素序列中的相邻 (AD) 和非相邻 (NAD) 依赖关系对于许多复杂能力的发展至关重要，例如语言习得和社交互动。虽然婴儿期的 AD 学习是一种跨不同领域发挥作用的普遍能力，但 NAD 的处理仅在言语序列中得到报道。在这里，我们测试了 9 至 12 个月大和 13 至 15 个月大的婴儿在不熟悉元素的视觉序列中提取 AxB 语法的能力。婴儿在一系列 3 个视觉数组中适应遵循 AxB 语法的规则，其中第一个元素 (A) 预测第三个元素 (B)，而中间的 X 元素不断变化。在适应之后，婴儿用 3 个项目数组进行测试，其中初始和最终位置被切换（新颖）或与适应阶段保持一致（熟悉）。年龄较大的婴儿在测试中成功识别出熟悉的 AxB 语法，而年龄较小的婴儿虽然表现出对 NAD 的一些敏感性，但形式不太稳健。这一发现首次证明，追踪 NAD 的能力是一种普遍能力，也存在于视觉领域，并且对这种依赖关系的敏感性与听觉领域的发展变化有关。
