Grammatical Categorization in Mandarin-Chinese-Learning Infants

Abstract

In previous perceptual studies infants showed emerging grammatical categorization during the preverbal and early verbal stage. The issue has only been studied with European-language-learning infants. We inquired whether categorization is a general ability in infants regardless of language background, and whether function words in bigram distribution are sufficient for guiding grammatical category learning. In a preferential looking task, Mandarin-Chinese 12-month-olds were familiarized with two categories of novel words with preceding function words in Mandarin. Test trials presented new combinations that were grammatical versus ungrammatical. Grammaticality depended on the distributional patterns between the novel words and the function words in the familiarization. Infants discriminated the test trials, showing emerging categorization ability. We suggest that function words are special anchors for learning and that the ability to use them for grammatical categorization is fundamental and general in human infants.