Artificial Grammar Learning by 1-year-olds

Rebecca L. Gomez and LouAnn Gerken (1999) conducted four experiments using head-turn preference procedures with infants to study their ability to remember and extract information from auditory strings of an artificial grammar. Their findings in these experiments showed that infants can discriminate new grammatical and ungrammatical strings after less than 2 minutes of exposure to the stimuli. These experiments showed that the infants were acquiring new and specific information about the grammar. Previous research has shown that by 10 months of age infants are able to acquire specific information about their native grammar. However, the researcher felt that more research into what types of information infants acquire at different ages of development was necessary due to the limitations in understanding the actual mechanisms involved in language acquisition. 

The researchers highlight that past studies did not account for these limitations or allow for controlling of prior learning, specific structural factors or the learning environment. To control for these aspects, Gomez and Gerken used artificial language stimuli. Artificial grammars had been used in similar studies with adults, but are more often being used in research with infants as well to discover the mechanisms used to segment, process, and understand speech. Past studies using artificial grammars to test infants suggest that infants can discriminate transitional probabilities within words from ones between words and that infants show a listening preference for familiar strings of sounds from the grammar, even once they are reordered.