Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Language Perception 61
and abstract representations of constructions developing internal structure. Then pat-
terns of relationships build up between constructions and their parts, leading to increasing
complexity and schematization. Thus, recent constructivist accounts suggest that the
abstract transitive construction builds up from a number of different sources: pre-verbal
knowledge of causality, the ability to match arguments in an utterance to referents in the
environment, the development of other lexically specific constructions around pronouns,
and high-frequency items. For example, Fernandes et al. (2006) demonstrate a
receptive understanding of argument structure in two-year olds. These were able to map
a single scene onto two distinct syntactic frames (transitive and intransitive).
A fundamental mechanism for the acquisition of syntactic regularities is statistical
learning (see above). 10 Gomez and Gerken (1999) exposed 12-month-olds to strings of
syllable-words produced by one of two complex grammars, leading to considerable
variability in the order of the words within the sentences (i.e., a certain word could
occur in different positions in the sentence). After a brief exposure (50 up to 127 seconds)
to a subset of strings, generated by a training grammar, infants were tested for
discrimination of new strings from the two different grammars. Infants listened longer
to new strings from their training grammar than to strings from another grammar. Although
they were never tested on the exact strings encountered during training, the
constraints placed on word ordering were the same during training and test. This demonstrates
that learning generalized to novel strings with familiar co-occurrence patterns.
Likewise, Marcus, Vijayan, Bandi Rao, and Vishton (1999) demonstrated that infants
can abstract beyond specific word order and acquire algebra-like rules (involving substitution
of arbitrary elements in a sequence of abstract variables): Seven-month-olds were
familiarized with syllable strings based on a certain underlying pattern (ABB vs. ABA)
that was the same for training and for test, however with a different vocabulary of syllables
(e.g., wi-di-wi vs. ba-po-ba). Infants discriminated strings with the training patterns
from those with a different pattern despite the change in vocabulary. Very likely operations
over abstract (rather than perceptually bound) variables are the basis for the acquisition
of algebra-like rules. Such rules may be a basis for linguistic productivity (e.g.,
children have to learn that determiners precede nouns, etc.).
Although sensitivity to word order is necessary for tracking sequential information in
sentences, learners must ultimately abstract beyond the ordering of specific words. The
experiment of Gomez and Gerken (1999) outlined above suggests that infants had abstracted
some aspect of grammatical structure. The detection non-adjacent dependencies
might be a first step into grammar (Bonatti, Pena, Nespor, & Mehler, 2005; Gomez,
10
Such learning mechanism are only proposed by interactionist accounts.