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,…

Investigated 7-month olds' ability to relate vowel sounds with objects when intersensory redundancy was present versus absent. Found that infants detected a mismatch in the vowel-object pairs in the moving-synchronous condition but not in the still or moving-asynchronous condition, demonstrating that temporal synchrony between vocalizations and…

Seven-month-old infants require redundant information such as temporal synchrony to learn arbitrary syllable-object relations. Infants learned the relations between spoken syllables, /a/ and /i/, and two moving objects only when temporal synchrony was present during habituation. Two experiments examined infants' memory for these relations. In…

Three experiments assessed the intersensory redundancy hypothesis in early infancy. Findings indicated that habituation to a bimodal rhythm resulted in discrimination of a novel rhythm, whereas habituation to the same rhythm presented unimodally resulted in no evidence of discrimination. Temporal synchrony between the bimodal auditory and visual…