Gary F. Marcus et al. (1) familiarized 7-month-old infants with sequences of syllables generated by an artificial grammar; the infants were then able to discriminate between sequences generated both by that grammar and another, even though sequences in the familiarization and test phases employed different syllables. Marcus et al. stated that their infants were representing, extracting, and generalizing abstract algebraic rules. This conclusion was motivated also by their statement that the infants' discrimination could not be performed by a popular class of simple neural network model.
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Altmann et al. (1999) studied this question.
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