Decisions, decisions: infant language learning when multiple generalizations are possible LouAnn Gerken Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA Received 4 January 2005; accepted 9 March 2005 Abstract Two experiments presented infants with artificial language input in which at least two generalizations were logically possible. The results demonstrate that infants made one of the two generalizations tested, the one that was most statistically consistent with the particular subset of the data they received. The experiments shed light on how learners might go about solving the induction problem for human language. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. An ever-growing collection of published studies demonstrates that, when infants are familiarized with a language-like system in the laboratory, they are able to extract patterns from that system (Chambers, Onishi, & Fisher, 2003; Go ´mez, 2002; Go ´mez & Gerken, 1999; Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002; Saffran & Thiessen, 2003; Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996) and generalize beyond the specific stimuli encountered during familiarization to new stimuli embodying the same pattern (Gerken, 2004; Gerken, Wilson, & Lewis, in press; Go ´mez & Gerken, 1999; Go ´mez & LaKusta, 2004; Marcus, Vijayan, Rao, & Vishton, 1999; Maye & Weiss, 2003). A handful of these studies has also begun to explore what generalizations infants make when presented with different samples generated by the same formal system. For example, Go ´ mez (2002) familiarized 18-month- olds with an artificial grammar of the form AXB and CXD, in which there is a dependency between the A and B elements and between the C and D elements. She found that it was only when the middle element was selected from a large pool (24) that infants could detect the relation between the first and third elements in the grammar. In a similar vein, Cognition xx (2005) 1–8 www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT 0022-2860/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.03.003 E-mail address: gerken@u.arizona.edu. DTD 5 ARTICLE IN PRESS