Language-Related Rule Learning in Monolingual Children

open_access
Open Access
Author:
Pinamonti, Melina Jade
Area of Honors:
Communication Sciences and Disorders
Degree:
Bachelor of Science
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Dr. Carol Anne Miller, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Carol Anne Miller, Thesis Honors Advisor
Dr. Chaleece Wyatt Sandberg, Faculty Reader
Keywords:
language acquisition
toddlers
causal reasoning
rule learning
monolingual
blicket detector
eye-tracking
Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to investigate abstract rule-learning abilities in multiple age groups of monolingual children. The ability to learn abstract rules is necessary in order to learn the rules of a particular language system. Past research has mainly focused on infants’ and children’s ability to learn and retain a single rule. The current study set out to add to the literature by investigating young children’s ability to learn a single rule using eye-tracking technology, as well as investigating children’s ability to learn single and multiple rules through a pilot study using a “Blicket-Detector” paradigm. The first experiment found that when presented with a violation of a rule and a non-violation of a rule, children between the ages of 18 and 22 months do not spend more time looking at the violation of the rule, leading us to believe that they did not learn the single rule. The second experiment found that children between the ages of 34 and 42 months did not perform above chance when learning a single rule, and that only one out of the two children who were exposed to a second rule performed above chance on the second rule task. The performance of children in both experiments differed from what is expected based on results of the current literature on causal reasoning.