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Dog is a dog is a dog: infant rule learning is not specific to language.

Saffran JR, Pollak SD, Seibel RL, Shkolnik A

Department of Psychology and Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA. jsaffran@wisc.edu

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). Rule learning by seven-month-old infants. Science, 283, 77-80.]. The results of three experiments demonstrate that 7-month-old infants can detect and generalize these same patterns when the elements consist of pictures of animals (dogs and cats). These findings indicate that rule learning of this type is not specific to language acquisition.

Published 9 October 2007 in Cognition, 105(3): 669-80.
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