Is symmetry inference an essential component of language?
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Is symmetry inference an essential component of language? Thomas F. Chartier 1 & Arnaud Rey 1 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Summary Symmetry inference—that is, spontaneously deriving the stimulus association B-A from A-B—was recently reported in preverbal infants (Kabdebon & Dehaene-Lambertz, 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116[12], 5805–5810) and regarded as a “building block for human cognition.” Here, we argue that empirical evidence supporting this claim is insufficient, and that absence of symmetry inference in nonhuman animals should be reassessed. Keywords Associative learning . Symmetry inference . Preverbal humans . Language evolution Bidirectional associations are a central feature of human language, as they permit a flexible and interchangeable use between spoken, written, or sign words, and representations of the objects referred to. For example, one can both think about a dog upon hearing “dog” and say “dog” upon thinking about one. While such symmetrical associations are easily conceived as arising from a bidirectional training, as happens when parents repeatedly name and show a given object to a child, human adults or children trained on successive stimulus pairings A-B have been reported to spontaneously derive the reversed, untrained relations B-A— that is, to infer bidirectional associations from unidirectional ones (e.g., Sidman et al., 1982). This capacity, called symmetry inference, has proved highly difficult to demonstrate experimentally in nonhuman animals (e.g., Medam, Marzouki, Montant, & Fagot, 2016) and could thus be unique to people. Such findings have raised strong interest as to the potential necessity of symmetry inference for language to develop, making it the marker of a possible discontinuity between human and nonhuman behavior. However, because symmetry inference means disregarding the order of elements that are associated, one can argue that such propensity can be detrimental, as it may break naturally occurring causal regularities and induce maladaptive behaviors. In this view, it is expected that nonhuman animals do not show symmetry inference, and surprising that humans do; such cognitive bias in humans might simply emerge together with language development, as a by-product of our constant use of bidirectional associations. A strong argument in favor of symmetry inference being required for language would be to find it in preverbal humans. * Arnaud Rey [email protected] 1
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université, UMR 7290, Bâtiment 9 Case D, 3, place Victor Hugo, 13331 Marseille Cedex 3, France
A recent PNAS article (Kabdebon & Dehaene-Lambertz, 2019) has reported such results. Using EEG recordings, the authors tested the ability of 5-month-old infants to abstract representations from patterns of trisyllabic spoken nonsense words (e.g., “ba-ke-tu”) and associate these representations with visual or auditory labels (e.g., a picture of a lion). In their critical Experimen
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