One of two general cognitive skills that enables humans to acquire language. This ability allows humans to recognise patterns and perform 'statistical' analysis over sequences of perceptual input, including the auditory stream that constitutes spoken language. Pre-linguistic infants – children under a year old – employ this ability in order to abstract across utterances and find repeated patterns that allow them to construct linguistic units. It is this pattern-finding ability that underlies the abstraction process assumed in cognitive grammar.

Infant pattern-finding skills are not limited to language.

Researchers have also found that infants demonstrate the same skills when the experiment is repeated with non-linguistic tone sequences and with visual, as opposed to auditory, sequences. Moreover, this pattern-finding ability appears not to be limited to humans but is also apparent in other primates. For instance, Tamarin monkeys demonstrate the same pattern-recognition abilities when exposed to the same kinds of auditory and visual sequencing experiments described above for human infants. According to Michael Tomasello, the ability to acquire high-level symbolic behaviour such as language is a function, therefore, of a further ability that humans but other primates do not possess. This constitutes an intention reading ability.