In this research we looked at whether infants (12- to 14-month-old) can succesfully use their lexical knowledge to aid them in acquiring an abstract grammatical rule about visually presented...Show moreIn this research we looked at whether infants (12- to 14-month-old) can succesfully use their lexical knowledge to aid them in acquiring an abstract grammatical rule about visually presented grammars. The infants in the known condition were unable to generalize this grammatical rule. However, there was learning in the nonsense condition.Show less
When infants have two possible rules that they can discover in an artificial language, a prosodic rule and a structure rule, which one do they discover and does this change with development? Prior...Show moreWhen infants have two possible rules that they can discover in an artificial language, a prosodic rule and a structure rule, which one do they discover and does this change with development? Prior studies on infants’ cue weighing suggest a preference for prosodic cues for eight-month-old infants, and a preference for structure for ten-month-old infants when segmenting speech. Using a Headturn Preference Procedure with adapted stimuli from Spierings and ten Cate (2014), we compared looking times for a prosody and structure test condition. We found condition did not have a significant effect on looking time. However, ten-month-old infants had significantly longer looking times compared to the eight-month-old infants. We also found a significant difference for gender, suggesting that female infants have a preference for a different cue to discover underlying language patterns than males.Show less
