Learning Grammar at the Age of 6 Months: An ERP-Study
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1
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
Natural sentences consist of adjacent and non-adjacent elements. In order to learn the grammar of a language, the extraction of rules and regularities from the speech input is required. Although a few studies have focused on the matter of grammar learning behaviourally (e.g., Marcus et al., 1999; Gomez & Gerken, 1999; Santelmann and Jusczyk, 1998; Gomez, 2002; Höhle et al., 2006), no study reported so far electrophysiological data dealing with the mechanisms of rule learning in young children. The present ERP-study was designed to investigate whether infants are sensitive to non-adjacent syntactic dependencies and whether this ability potentially precedes the behavioural competence to use it. Our study included 6-month-old children from monolingual German families and used an incidental language learning and a violation paradigm. The material we used consisted of infant-directed Italian sentences, which were spoken by a native Italian-speaking woman. In order to prevent suprasegmental prosodic cues might facilitate the learning process; a complex splicing procedure guaranteed that the phonological forms of the critical morphemes were the only available cues. During four learning phases all children were exposed to short correct Italian sentences, which contained non-adjacent dependencies between the auxiliary and the suffix of a verb. Interspersed after each learning phase were testing phases, in which the impact of learning on the processing of correct and incorrect examples of the presented sentences was tested. The ERP-results of the test phases revealed clear differences between the processing of correct and incorrect sentences, which was expressed as a negativity for the processing of the incorrect sentences compared to the correct ones. The results of the present study indicate that already 6-month-old infants are able to learn the rules of a new language even in the absence of prosody.
Conference:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Türkiye, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Language
Citation:
Oberecker
R,
Mueller
J and
Friederici
A
(2008). Learning Grammar at the Age of 6 Months: An ERP-Study.
Conference Abstract:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.255
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Received:
09 Dec 2008;
Published Online:
09 Dec 2008.
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Correspondence:
Regine Oberecker, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, roberecker@googlemail.com