We often wonder how we learn to speak during childhood or how the little ones are able to acquire knowledge about the world around them. The answers are multiple, and the little explorers scrutinize every corner, food or new object within their reach with their hands, eyes or even their mouths. Of course, the social interactions of boys and girls in their social and family environment also contribute to good learning, whether in the park or in nursery schools, but all these variables do not explain by themselves how this learning process is acquired. .
A new study entitled The scope and role of deduction in infant cognition, based on two experiments led by the Center for Brain and Cognition of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) prepared by Kinga Anna Bohus, Nicolo Cesana-Arlotti, Ana Martín-Salguero and Luca Lorenzo Bonatti points out that natural logical thinking, which manifests itself from a very early age and does not depend on linguistic knowledge, also facilitates this learning process.
The results of this work, which has been published in the journal Current Biology, have attempted to clarify a question that is still generating debate among neuroscientists: whether young children who have not learned to speak (or are developing speech) are able to reason logically. Well, this pioneering research seems to have cleared up this mystery, since it has shown that this natural logical reasoning has existed at least since 19 months of age, does not depend on linguistic knowledge, and is developed mainly through the strategy of exclusion by elimination. In other words, this means that when young children are faced with an unknown reality, what they do is try to analyze it and reach some conclusion about it, using a strategy based on discarding those options that, according to their level of knowledge at each moment, are not possible.
Young boys and girls tend to resolve uncertainties by ruling out impossible options according to the level of knowledge they have at each moment.
As pointed out by UPF, the study analyzes the importance of two strategies used by children at an early age to deal with uncertainties: association and exclusion (or disjunction by elimination). The first strategy would imply that children, upon hearing a new word that can refer to two unknown objects that they are seeing, mentally associate the term with each of them. Subsequently, they would associate the term with the object with which this denomination best suited them. The second strategy (exclusion) explains how, based on logical reasoning by elimination of alternatives, a young boy or girl can learn a new word. For example, if it sees two objects (A and B) and hears an unknown term that it knows is not from A (because it knows the name of A), it will determine that it is the name of B. This is the predominant strategy, according to the results of the study.
Analyze the natural logic of the little ones when faced with unknown objects and terms
The research team has carried out two different experiments. In the first one, 61 19-month-old boys and girls (26 monolingual and 35 bilingual) have participated. In the second, the sample was made up of 33 participants of the same age (19 monolingual and 14 bilingual). The analysis of both groups was fundamental to determine if the deductive processes depend on the linguistic experience.
In the first experiment, the participants were shown two objects, which they had to associate with one of the words they heard, through different tests. In the first one, they had to observe two objects they knew (for example, a spoon and a cookie) and, upon hearing a term (for example, spoon), associate it with one of the two. In the second test, young children were shown an object they knew (for example, an apple) and an object that they did not know (for example, a carburetor), and they listened to the word corresponding to the known object (apple), which they had to identify. The third trial was the same as the second, except for the fact that the term heard corresponded to the unknown word (continuing with the previous example, carburetor).
In the second experiment, two objects or animated beings were used (for example, an umbrella and the figure of a boy), each of them associated with a sound. Subsequently, the two objects were covered so that the child did not see them and one of them was put into a cup. Upon discovering them, he only saw one of the two objects and had to guess, by elimination, which one was inside the cup. In a later test (with the two objects covered and without changing their position), he listened to the sound associated with one of them and analyzed whether he directed his gaze towards the correct object.
In all of these tests, their gaze movement patterns were assessed. For example, when reasoning by exclusion, what young children do is look at object A and, if they rule out that the term they have heard refers to it, then they turn their gaze towards B. This is what This is known as the double check strategy.
There is no difference between the logic of monolingual and bilingual young children.
The main author of the research, Kinga Anna Bohus, summarizes the main conclusions of the study as follows: “We have analyzed the presence of the concept of logical disjunction in 19-month-old infants. In a referent word mapping task, both bilingual and monolingual infants display a pattern of oculomotor inspection that had previously been found to be a hallmark of disjunctive reasoning in adults and children.
In short, the results of the study do not show relevant differences between the logical reasoning of monolingual and bilingual children, which confirms that it does not depend on linguistic knowledge. This natural logical thought could be present before 19 months of age, although there is still not enough scientific evidence to demonstrate its presence at earlier ages.
Source: Pompeu Fabra University
