Amazing stuff!
"... In contrast to older children and adults, infants cannot yet express their thought processes, thus assessing their abilities in experimental settings typically entails observing their behavior. To evaluate their compositional abilities, [researchers] ... carried out three experiments using a well-established experimental paradigm for research with infants, which involves measuring the time they spend gazing at specific objects. ...
Infants who took part in the team's experiment were shown videos of an actress who reached for an object and then made a facial expression expressing negation (i.e., "not-face"). Interestingly, the researchers found that 12-month-old infants looked longer at the actress when she was making the "not-face," which suggests that they understood the meaning of the facial expression and thus had basic compositional abilities. ...
In their three experiments, ... gathered evidence that infants can correctly compose simple noun-verb sentences at approximately 14 months of age, can understand compositional facial expressions (i.e., a negation expressed through a facial expression) at one year of age, and can make basic mental physical transformations when they are 10 months old. Collectively, their findings suggest that compositionality can emerge before humans learn to speak, indicating it could be based on simpler processes than previously anticipated. ..."
From the abstract:
"Compositionality is a means of constructing complex objects through the transformation and combination of simpler elements. While it is common to view compositionality as inherently complex, and thus to assume that compositionality is a byproduct of advanced language expertise, we argue otherwise. We propose that, although compositionality produces complex outcomes, the underlying processes are simple and can often be reduced to the general mechanism of function application. Accordingly, we explore the origins of compositionality not only in compositional language but also, and at an earlier stage, in the development of compositional representations and thoughts in young infants. Infants correctly composed simple noun-verb sentences at 14 months, facial expressions with objects at 12 months, and mental physical transformations at 10 months. This offers evidence for function application, the essence of compositionality, in infancy—emerging well before and outside the development of compositional language."
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