Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Ferguson B
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4858667 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Ferguson Brock B Lew-Williams Casey C
Scientific reports 20160506
The mechanisms underlying the discovery of abstract rules like those found in natural language may be evolutionarily tuned to speech, according to previous research. When infants hear speech sounds, they can learn rules that govern their combination, but when they hear non-speech sounds such as sine-wave tones, they fail to do so. Here we show that infants' rule learning is not tied to speech per se, but is instead enhanced more broadly by communicative signals. In two experiments, infants succe ...[more]