SynthesisDevelopmental science2019
The profile of abstract rule learning in infancy: Meta-analytic and experimental evidence.
Synthesis in Developmental science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 87 citations in OpenAlex.
- Perceptual and conceptual novelty independently guide infant looking behaviour: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Nature human behaviour · 2024Pooled it
- Brain responses to repetition-based rule-learning do not exhibit sex differences: an aggregated analysis of infant fNIRS studies.Scientific reports · 2024Pooled it
- Estimating publication bias in meta-analyses of peer-reviewed studies: A meta-meta-analysis across disciplines and journal tiers.Research synthesis methods · 2021Pooled it
- The development of infants' responses to mispronunciations: A meta-analysis.Developmental psychology · 2021Pooled it
- The profile of abstract rule learning in infancy: Meta-analytic and experimental evidence.Developmental science · 2019Pooled it
- ManyBabies 3: A Multi-Lab Study of Infant Algebraic Rule Learning.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Children use algorithm induction to discover patterns in data.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neural entrainment to visual rules in infant and adult brain.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Infants Do Not Reliably Track When Bilingual Speakers Switch Languages.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Six-month-old infants use cross-modal synchrony to identify novel communicative signals.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Monolingual and bilingual infants' attention to talking faces: evidence from eye-tracking and Bayesian modeling.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Individual differences in auditory perception predict learning of non-adjacent tone sequences in 3-year-olds.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Learning and generalization of repetition-based rules in autism.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Reproducibility of infant fNIRS studies: a meta-analytic approach.Neurophotonics · 2023Article
- Robustness of the rule-learning effect in 7-month-old infants: A close, multicenter replication of Marcus et al. (1999).Developmental science · 2023Article
- Abstract representations of small sets in newborns.Cognition · 2022Article
- From social contingency to verbal reference: A constructivist hypothesis.Psychological review · 2022Review
- Children's value-based decision making.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Infants differentially extract rules from language.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Learning non-adjacent rules and non-adjacent dependencies from human actions in 9-month-old infants.PloS one · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Everyone agrees that infants possess general mechanisms for learning about the world, but the existence and operation of more specialized mechanisms is controversial. One mechanism-rule learning-has been proposed as potentially specific to speech, based on findings that 7-month-olds can learn abstract repetition rules from spoken syllables (e.g. ABB patterns: wo-fe-fe, ga-tu-tu…) but not from closely matched stimuli, such as tones. Subsequent work has shown that learning of abstract patterns is not simply specific to speech. However, we still lack a parsimonious explanation to tie together the diverse, messy, and occasionally contradictory findings in that literature. We took two routes to creating a new profile of rule learning: meta-analysis of 20 prior reports on infants' learning of abstract repetition rules (including 1,318 infants in 63 experiments total), and an experiment on learning of such rules from a natural, non-speech communicative signal. These complementary approaches revealed that infants were most likely to learn abstract patterns from meaningful stimuli. We argue that the ability to detect and generalize simple patterns supports learning across domains in infancy but chiefly when the signal is meaningfully relevant to infants' experience with sounds, objects, language, and people.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.