Neurophysiological correlates of auditory rule learning across development

Jutta L. Mueller

Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück

Human grammar learning characteristically involves decomposing the ongoing speech stream into its parts and relating these to each other in a complex way. While children produce complex grammatical patterns in the form of small phrases and sentences only in the second year of life, sensitivity to grammatical regularities has been demonstrated much earlier using behaviour-independent neurophysiological measures. I will present a series of learning experiments using auditory miniature languages and artificial grammars using electrophysiological and hemodynamic measures in infants and adults. The studies provide evidence that infants possess the ability to detect complex sequential patterns in the auditory input already within their first half year of life. In the absence of attention, infants’ learning ability seems to even surpass adults’ capabilities. It will be argued that infants’ early grammar learning mechanisms are powerful, yet only a prerequisite stage which forms a scaffolding for later acquisition of abstract syntactic functions.