Ferguson, B. 1 & Lew-Williams, C. 2
1 Northwestern University
2 Princeton University
Infants reliably detect first-order statistical patterns across a host of modalities (e.g, Kirkham et al., 2002; Saffran et al., 1996, 1999). However, their ability to detect higher-order relational patterns (i.e., 'abstract rules' such as ABB and ABA) has been shown to be considerably more limited. By 7 months, infants reliably learn relational patterns from speech syllables but fail to do so from other sounds such as tones (Marcus et al., 2007). We test the hypothesis that this 'speech advantage' results from an emerging interest in communicative signals. In a first experiment (N=32), we found that infants do learn relational patterns from tones when, before the task, they are led to believe the tones serve a communicative function; however, they fail when merely familiarized to tones. In a second experiment (N=32), the power of this communicative demonstration is revealed: Infants who were led to believe tones were communicative not only learned relational patterns from tones but, moreover, later transferred these patterns to speech sounds - thus extending their abstraction far beyond the training domain. We conclude that communicative signals in general facilitate infants' relational pattern learning, and consider existing attentional (Kuhl et al., 2003) and Bayesian (Dawson & Gerken, 2009) explanations.