{"id":210542,"date":"2025-04-04T06:26:39","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T11:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/one-year-old-infants-already-display-compositional-abilities-study-finds"},"modified":"2025-04-04T06:26:39","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T11:26:39","slug":"one-year-old-infants-already-display-compositional-abilities-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/one-year-old-infants-already-display-compositional-abilities-study-finds","title":{"rendered":"One-year-old infants already display compositional abilities, study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/one-year-old-infants-already-display-compositional-abilities-study-finds3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>To understand complex objects, humans are known to mentally transform them and represent them as a combination of simpler elements. This ability, known as compositionality, was so far assumed to require fluency in language, thus emerging in childhood after humans have learned to speak and understand others.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at Aix-Marseille University-CNRS and PSL University \u00c9cole des Hautes \u00c9tudes en Sciences Sociales-CNRS recently explored the possibility that compositionality is based on simple processes and might therefore already be present in infants. Their paper, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s44271-025-00222-9\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Communications Psychology<\/i>, provides evidence that infants as young as 1-year-old already possess basic compositional abilities.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are generally interested in understanding what is in place before language takes off in an infant\u2019s mind,\u201d Isabelle Dautriche, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. \u201cOne of the central properties of language is compositionality, which is a long word that simply means the capacity to put words together to understand sentences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To understand complex objects, humans are known to mentally transform them and represent them as a combination of simpler elements. This ability, known as compositionality, was so far assumed to require fluency in language, thus emerging in childhood after humans have learned to speak and understand others. Researchers at Aix-Marseille University-CNRS and PSL University \u00c9cole [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}