Crossing the Boundary: No Catastrophic Limits on Infants’ Capacity to Represent Linguistic Sequences

Abstract

The boundary effect, namely the infants’ failures to compare small and large numerosities, is well documented in studies using visual stimuli. The prevailing explanation is that the numerical system used to process sets up to 3 is incompatible with the system employed for numbers >3. This study investigates the boundary effect in 10-month-old infants presented with linguistic sequences. In Condition 1 (2 vs. 3), infants can differentiate small syllable sequences (2 vs. 3), with better performance for the 2-syllable sequence, which imposes a lower memory load. Condition 2 (2 vs. 4) revealed that infants are capable of discriminating across bounds, with relatively higher performance for the 4-syllable sequence, possibly encoded as one large ensemble. This study offers evidence that, when processing linguistic sounds, infants flexibly deal with small and large numerical representations with no boundaries or incompatibilities between them. Simultaneously encoding units of different magnitudes might aid early speech processing beyond memory limits.