The ability to generalize previous knowledge to new contexts is a key aspect of human cognition and relational learning. A well-known learning maxim is that breadth of training predicts "breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer." When examples vary in their surface features, this provides evidence that only the common relational…

Purpose: This study was specifically designed to examine how verb variability and verb overlap in a morphosyntactic priming task affect typically developing children's use and generalization of auxiliary IS. Method: Forty typically developing 2- to 3-year-old native English-speaking children with inconsistent auxiliary IS production were primed…

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…

Children begin to learn abstract rules at an early age, in an implicit way, without access to rule descriptions. They rely on specific rule instances that they encounter. However, rule instances often co-occur with rule-inconsistent instances. One kind of inconsistent input, non-application instances, constitutes a learnability problem. For…

Infants' disposition to learn repetitions in the input structure has been demonstrated in pattern generalization (e.g., learning the pattern ABB from the token "ledidi"). This study tested whether a repetition advantage can also be found in lexical learning (i.e., learning the word "lele" vs. "ledi"). Twenty-four…

Previous research indicates that infants generalize syntactic-like structures to novel exemplars in a way that has been characterized as abstract and algebraic (Marcus et al., 1999). Infants appear to learn and generalize from speech more successfully than from nonspeech stimuli (Marcus, Fernandes, & Johnson, 2007). In this series of experiments,…

Extensive exposure to representational media is common for infants in Western culture, and previous research has shown that soon after their 1st birthday, infants can acquire and extend new information from pictures to real objects. Here we explore the extent to which lack of exposure to pictures during infancy affects children's learning from…

Previous work demonstrated that 9-month-olds who were familiarized with 3-syllable strings consistent with both a broader (AAB or ABA) and narrower (AA"di" or A"di"A) generalization made only the latter. Because the narrower generalization is a subset of the broader one, any example that is consistent with the broader generalization but not the…

Emerging phonotactic knowledge facilitates the development of the mental lexicon, as demonstrated by studies showing that infants use the phonotactic patterns of their native language to extract words from continuous speech. The present study provides a computational account of how infants might induce phonotactics from their immediate language…

We present a neurocomputational model with self-organizing maps that accounts for the emergence of taxonomic responding and fast mapping in early word learning, as well as a rapid increase in the rate of acquisition of words observed in late infancy. The quality and efficiency of generalization of word-object associations is directly related to…

Human infants possess powerful learning mechanisms used for the acquisition of language. To what extent are these mechanisms domain specific? One well-known infant language learning mechanism is the ability to detect and generalize rule-like similarity patterns, such as ABA or ABB [Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Rao, S. B., & Vishton, P. M. (1999).…

Recent research suggests that humans and other animals have sophisticated abilities to extract both statistical dependencies and rule-based regularities from sequences. Most of this research stresses the flexibility and generality of such processes. Here the authors take up an equally important project, namely, to explore the limits of such…