The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.

One of the most intriguing findings on language comprehension is that violations of syntactic predictions can affect event-related potentials as early as 120 ms, in the same time-window as early sensory processing. This effect, the so-called early left-anterior negativity (ELAN), has been argued to reflect word category access and initial syntactic structure building (Friederici, 2002). In two experiments, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate whether (a) rapid word category identification relies on overt category-marking closed-class morphemes and (b) whether violations of word category predictions affect modality-specific sensory responses. Participants read sentences containing violations of word category predictions. Unexpected items varied in whether or not their word category was marked by an overt function morpheme. In Experiment 1, the amplitude of the visual evoked M100 component was increased for unexpected items, but only when word category was overtly marked by a function morpheme. Dipole modeling localized the generator of this effect to the occipital cortex. Experiment 2 replicated the main results of Experiment 1 and eliminated two non-morphology-related explanations of the M100 contrast we observed between targets containing overt category-marking and targets that lacked such morphology. Our results show that during reading, syntactically relevant cues in the input can affect activity in occipital regions at around 125 ms, a finding that may shed new light on the remarkable rapidity of language processing.

Syntactic factors can rapidly affect behavioral and neural responses during language processing, however, the mechanisms that allow this rapid extraction of syntactically relevant information remain poorly understood. We address this issue using magnetoencephalography, and find that an unexpected word category (like The recently princess…) elicits enhanced activity in visual cortex as early as 120ms, as a function of the compatibility of a word's form with the form properties associated with a predicted word category. Since no sensitivity to linguistic factors has been previously reported for words in isolation at this stage of visual analysis, we propose that predictions about upcoming syntactic categories are translated into form-based estimates, which are made available to sensory cortices. This finding may be a key component to elucidating the mechanisms that allow the extreme rapidity and efficiency of language comprehension.

The experiments reported here investigated the development of a fundamental component of cognition: to recognize and generalize abstract relations. Infants were presented with simple rulegoverned patterned sequences of visual shapes (ABB, AAB, and ABA) that could be discriminated from differences in the position of the repeated element (late, early, or nonadjacent, respectively). Eight-month-olds were found to distinguish patterns on the basis of the repetition, but appeared insensitive to its position in the sequence; 11-month-olds distinguished patterns over the position of the repetition, but appeared insensitive to the nonadjacent repetition. These results suggest that abstract pattern detection may develop incrementally in a process of constructing complex relations from more primitive components.Detection and generalization of patterns is a fundamental, core component of cognition, central to object and face recognition (Biederman, 1987;Hummel & Biederman, 1992), categorization (Kruschke, 1992), inference (Tenenbaum & Griffiths, 2001), reasoning (Murphy, 2002), word segmentation (Swingley, 2005), language acquisition (Brown, 1973;Pinker, 1994), and other developmental achievements. A central question often posed by developmental researchers, therefore, concerns the ability of infants and children to learn patterns and structure. The environment contains an immeasurable variety of objects and events, and an infinite number of relations between them, most of which are not useful for the developing child. It is essential, then, to understand the types of patterns that children are and are not able to learn.Correspondence should be addressed to Scott P. Johnson, UCLA Psychology-Developmental, Box 951563, 1285 Franz Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563. E-mail: scott.johnson@ucla.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptInfancy. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2009 March 11. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptOne common approach in investigations of early pattern perception is to examine infants' sensitivity to structured relations among stimulus features in visual or auditory input. Experiments on statistical learning, for example, have explored the extent to which infants detect and use distributional information in auditory or visual sequences to combine individual features into larger units. Typically in these experiments, infants are presented with a stream of input consisting of repeating multielement units with randomized order, but fixed internal structure. Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996) used this approach to investigate 8-month-old infants' word segmentation in a corpus of artificial speech. Noting that adjacent sounds in natural speech that are likely to cooccur are usually found within words, whereas low-probability sound pairs tend to span word boundaries, Saffran et al. asked whether this difference in probability of cooccurrence provides potential information for word boundaries. Infants' discrimination of high-and low-probability sound pairs was e...

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.