Marcus G F, Vijayan S, Bandi Rao S, Vishton P M
Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Science. 1999 Jan 1;283(5398):77-80. doi: 10.1126/science.283.5398.77.
A fundamental task of language acquisition is to extract abstract algebraic rules. Three experiments show that 7-month-old infants attend longer to sentences with unfamiliar structures than to sentences with familiar structures. The design of the artificial language task used in these experiments ensured that this discrimination could not be performed by counting, by a system that is sensitive only to transitional probabilities, or by a popular class of simple neural network models. Instead, these results suggest that infants can represent, extract, and generalize abstract algebraic rules.
语言习得的一项基本任务是提取抽象代数规则。三项实验表明，7个月大的婴儿对具有不熟悉结构的句子的关注时间比对具有熟悉结构的句子的关注时间更长。这些实验中使用的人工语言任务设计确保了这种区分无法通过计数、仅对过渡概率敏感的系统或一类流行的简单神经网络模型来完成。相反，这些结果表明婴儿能够表征、提取和概括抽象代数规则。
