Postersession 2
Poster #: 38
Topic: Development (infancy, childhood, adolescence, and aging)
Thursday, Sep 10, 2015
14:30-16:00
1st floor
Little grammar experts: 5-month-old infants’ mismatch responses reveal the ability to process a triple center-embedding
1Neuropsychology, IMPRS NeuroCom, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
2Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
3Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
4Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Germany
winklerm@cbs.mpg.de
Human grammar crucially involves the processing of hierarchical structures, for instance center-embeddings, which are known to be difficult to process in natural language [3], as well as in artificial grammar [5]. With increasing depth of embedding, the difficulty to process such structures increases, leading to the assumption, that more than 3 levels of center-embedding (LCE) are not comprehensible [3,5]. Recent research has shown extraordinary language learning abilities in very young infants. Neonates are able to learn dependencies between adjacent syllables [2], and infants as young as 3-4 months can process non-adjacent dependencies between syllables [1,4]. Our recent research has shown that 5-month-old infants are able to process complex hierarchical rules involving 2 LCE [6]. The aim of the present event- related potential study was to examine, whether 5-month-old infants are also able to process hierarchical rules with 3 LCE. Following the passive listening oddball paradigms of our previous experiments [4,6], we used sequences of auditory stimuli (pure sine tones) as oddball elements. The frequent standard sequences contained correct triple center-embeddings and the deviants contained positional violations to these rules. The results show infant mismatch responses, indicating that the infants successfully processed the underlying rules. Our experiment provides evidence that infants can process even such a complex hierarchical structure as a triple center-embedding between rapid non-linguistic stimuli. Further research is needed to examine whether these findings can be transferred to the linguistic domain.