Leiden University Student Repository

Wijnmalen, Joyce (2018)

Socks, Socks, Socks: The Influence of Variety and Lexical Knowledge on Visual Rule Learning by 12- to 14-Month-Old Infants

Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)

This thesis explores the abstract rule learning mechanism as proposed by Marcus et al. (1999). While Marcus et al. (1999) indicated that 7-month-old infants can recognize and generalize rule-like patterns (i.e., ABA or ABB patterns) in linguistic input, Saffran et al. (2007) showed that infants can also learn rules from visual input. This thesis aims to investigate whether visual rule learning is still connected to language in the form of lexical knowledge, as rule learning could be facilitated by familiarity with the label pertaining to a visual object. To explore this notion, Saffran et al. (2007) is replicated with 12- to 14-month-old infants, using socks with different colour schemes as the stimuli, since the word sock should be familiar to the participants. Furthermore, the role of within-stimulus variety between A and B items is explored by comparing the results from the current study to Van Leeuwen (2016), who used entirely different objects as A and B items in a similar...Show moreThis thesis explores the abstract rule learning mechanism as proposed by Marcus et al. (1999). While Marcus et al. (1999) indicated that 7-month-old infants can recognize and generalize rule-like patterns (i.e., ABA or ABB patterns) in linguistic input, Saffran et al. (2007) showed that infants can also learn rules from visual input. This thesis aims to investigate whether visual rule learning is still connected to language in the form of lexical knowledge, as rule learning could be facilitated by familiarity with the label pertaining to a visual object. To explore this notion, Saffran et al. (2007) is replicated with 12- to 14-month-old infants, using socks with different colour schemes as the stimuli, since the word sock should be familiar to the participants. Furthermore, the role of within-stimulus variety between A and B items is explored by comparing the results from the current study to Van Leeuwen (2016), who used entirely different objects as A and B items in a similar experiment.Show less

abstract rule learning

visual rule learning

lexical knowledge

infants

Author

Wijnmalen, Joyce

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Supervisors

Levelt, Claartje

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en