ABSTRACT Infants acquiring their native language are adept at discovering grammatical patterns. However, it remains unknown whether these learning abilities are limited to language, or available more generally for sequenced input. The current study is a conceptual replication of a prior language study, and was designed to ask whether infants can track phrase structure-like patterns from nonlinguistic auditory materials (sequences of computer alert sounds). One group of 12-month-olds was familiarized with an artificial grammar including predictive dependencies between sounds concatenated into strings, simulating the basic structure of phrases in natural languages. A second group of infants was familiarized with a grammar that lacked predictive dependencies. All infants were tested on the same set of familiar strings vs. novel (grammar-inconsistent) strings. Only infants exposed to the materials containing predictive dependencies showed successful discrimination between the test sentences, replicating the results from linguistic materials, and suggesting that predictive dependencies facilitate learning from nonlinguistic input.

中文翻译：

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12 个月大婴儿的非语言语法学习：限制学习的证据

摘要 学习母语的婴儿善于发现语法模式。然而，这些学习能力是否仅限于语言，或者更普遍地适用于序列输入，仍然未知。当前的研究是先前语言研究的概念复制，旨在询问婴儿是否可以从非语言听觉材料（计算机警报声音的序列）中跟踪类似短语结构的模式。一组 12 个月大的孩子熟悉了一种人工语法，包括连接成字符串的声音之间的预测依赖关系，模拟自然语言中短语的基本结构。第二组婴儿熟悉缺乏预测依赖性的语法。所有婴儿都在同一组熟悉的弦上进行了测试。新颖的（语法不一致的）字符串。只有暴露于包含预测依赖的材料的婴儿才能成功区分测试句子，复制语言材料的结果，并表明预测依赖有助于从非语言输入中学习。