ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Symbolic labeling in 5-month-old human infants.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Rhythmic visual stimulation as a window into early brain development: A systematic review.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2023Pooled it
- Dynamics of the attentional blink in preverbal infants.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Humans exhibit associative symmetry in the absence of backward training and stimulus overlap.Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior · 2025Article
- Phonological Feature Abstraction Before 6 Months: Amodal Recognition of Place of Articulation Across Multiple Consonants.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Brain areas for reversible symbolic reference, a potential singularity of the human brain.eLife · 2025Article
- The nature of label-induced categories: preverbal infants represent surface features and category symbols.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- A brief tablet-based intervention benefits linguistic and communicative abilities in toddlers and preschoolers.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
- Infant neuroscience: how to measure brain activity in the youngest minds.Trends in neurosciences · 2024Review
- Face specific neural anticipatory activity in infants 4 and 9 months old.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The power of rhythms: how steady-state evoked responses reveal early neurocognitive development.NeuroImage · 2022Article
- Bilingualism alters infants' cortical organization for attentional orienting mechanisms.Developmental science · 2022Article
- Disjunctive inference in preverbal infants.iScience · 2021Article
- Testing the role of symbols in preschool numeracy: An experimental computer-based intervention study.PloS one · 2021Article
- Is symmetry inference an essential component of language?Learning & behavior · 2020Article
- Infants' Learning of Rule-Based Visual Sequences Predicts Language Outcome at 2 Years.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
Humans' ability to create and manipulate symbolic structures far exceeds that of other animals. We hypothesized that this ability rests on an early capacity to use arbitrary signs to represent any mental representation, even as abstract as an algebraic rule. In three experiments, we collected high-density EEG recordings while 150 5-month-old infants were presented with speech triplets characterized by their abstract syllabic structure-the location of syllable repetition-which predicted a following arbitrary label (e.g., ABA words were followed by a fish picture, AAB words by a lion). After a brief learning phase, EEG responses to novel words revealed that infants built expectations about the upcoming label based on the triplet structure and were surprised when it happened to be incongruent. Preverbal infants were thus able to recode the incoming triplets into abstract mental variables to which arbitrary labels were flexibly assigned. Importantly, infants also generalized to novel trials in which the pairing order was reversed (with the label preceding the auditory structure). Beyond conditioned associations, infants instantly inferred a bidirectional mapping between the abstract structures and the following label, a foundational operation for any symbolic system.
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