ABSTRACT

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 example, a child might hear many instances of the dative shift rule in English, such as Mary gave the book to me → Mary gave me the book, and partial cases such as He will bring toys to you or He donated books to John, without being told which of the latter sentences (i.e., non-application instances) would be rule-possible or exceptions. We examined whether and how non-application instances may impact rule learning per se. Fourteen-month-old infants were passively exposed to an unfamiliar natural language. In Experiment 1 half of the training input supported an artificial word-order shift rule, and the other half were non-application singletons without shifting. During test, infants failed to generalize the rule to new instances, suggesting that the non-application cases in training were treated as non-rule cases and might have impeded rule learning. In Experiment 2 rule instances were dominant in type frequency relative to non-rule instances in the training input, and infants showed rule generalization, confirming that the non-rule instances in Experiment 1 indeed impeded learning. The token frequency of individual instances did not affect rule generalization. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated the same findings (of Experiments 1 and 2 respectively) with stimuli containing no morphological cues, demonstrating that the mechanism underlying abstract rule learning is robust, likely being one of the earliest learning mechanisms available to humans.

摘要

儿童从小就开始以隐性方式学习抽象规则，而无需访问规则描述。他们依赖于遇到的特定规则实例。但是，规则实例通常与规则不一致的实例同时出现。一种不一致的输入，非应用程序实例构成了可学习性问题。例如，一个孩子可能会听到许多用英语描述的和格转换规则的例子，例如玛丽把书给了我→玛丽把书给了我，还有部分情况，例如他会带玩具给你或他把书捐赠给约翰，而无需告知后一个句子（即非应用程序实例）是可能的规则还是例外。我们研究了非应用程序实例是否以及如何影响规则学习本身。14个月大的婴儿被动地接触了陌生的自然语言。在实验1中，一半的训练输入支持人工词序移位规则，另一半是没有移位的非应用单例。在测试过程中，婴儿未能将规则推广到新的实例，这表明训练中的非应用案例被视为非规则案例，并可能阻碍了规则学习。在实验2中，相对于非规则实例，规则实例在类型频率上占主导地位，婴儿表现出规则概括性，确认实验1中的非规则实例确实阻碍了学习。各个实例的标记频率不影响规则的概括。实验3和4在不包含形态学提示的刺激下重复了相同的发现（分别是实验1和2），表明抽象规则学习的基础机制很强大，很可能是人类最早的学习机制之一。