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Why do adult language learners typically fail to acquire second languages with native proficiency? Does prior linguistic experience influence the size of the "units" adults attend to in learning, and if so, how does this influence what gets learned? Here, we examine these questions in relation to grammatical gender, which adult learners almost invariably struggle to master. We present a model of learning that predicts that exposure to smaller units (such as nouns) before exposure to larger linguistic units (such as sentences) can critically impair learning about predictive relations between units: such as that between a noun and its article. This prediction is then confirmed by a study of adult participants learning grammatical gender in an artificial language. Adults learned both nouns and their articles better when they were first heard nouns used in context with their articles prior to hearing the nouns individually, compared with learners who first heard the nouns in isolation, prior to hearing them used in context. In the light of these results, we discuss the role gender appears to play in language, the importance of meaning in artificial grammar learning, and the implications of this work for the structure of L2-training.

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks and across modalities (e.g., auditory, visual), raising questions on the domain generality of SL. However, while SL is well established for infants and adults, only little is known about its developmental trajectory during childhood, leaving two important questions unanswered: (1) Is SL an early-maturing capacity that is fully developed in infancy, or does it improve with age like other cognitive capacities (e.g., memory)? and (2) Will SL have similar developmental trajectories across modalities? Only few studies have looked at SL across development, with conflicting results: some find age-related improvements while others do not. Importantly, no study to date has examined auditory SL across childhood, nor compared it to visual SL to see if there are modality-based differences in the developmental trajectory of SL abilities. We addressed these issues by conducting a large-scale study of children's performance on matching auditory and visual SL tasks across a wide age range (5-12y). Results show modality-based differences in the development of SL abilities: while children's learning in the visual domain improved with age, learning in the auditory domain did not change in the tested age range. We examine these findings in light of previous studies and discuss their implications for modality-based differences in SL and for the role of auditory SL in language acquisition. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kg35hoF0pw.

There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to the distributional properties of multi-word sequences. Such findings expand the range of information speakers are sensitive to and call for processing models that can represent larger chains of relations. In the current paper we investigate the effect of multi-word statistics on phonetic duration using a combination of experimental and corpus-based research. We ask (a) if phonetic duration is affected by multi-word frequency in both elicited and spontaneous speech, and (b) if syntactic constituency modulates the effect. We show that phonetic durations are reduced in higher frequency sequences, regardless of constituency: duration is shorter for more frequent sequences within and across syntactic boundaries. The effects are not reducible to the frequency of the individual words or substrings. These findings open up a novel set of questions about the interaction between surface distributions and higher order properties, and the resulting need (or lack thereof) to incorporate higher order properties into processing models.

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Do commonly used statistical-learning tasks capture stable individual differences in children? Infants, children, and adults are capable of using statistical learning (SL) to extract information about their environment. Although most studies have looked at group-level performance, a growing literature examines individual differences in SL and their relation to language-learning outcomes: Individuals who are better at SL are expected to show better linguistic abilities. Accordingly, studies have shown positive correlations between SL performance and language outcomes in both children and adults. However, these studies have often used tasks designed to explore group-level performance without modifying them, resulting in psychometric shortcomings that impact reliability in adults (Siegelman, Bogaerts, Christiansen, & Frost in Transactions of the Royal Society B, 372, 20160059, 2017a; Siegelman, Bogaerts, & Frost in Behavior Research Methods, 49, 418-432, 2017b). Even though similar measures are used to assess individual differences in children, no study to date has examined the reliability of these measures in development. This study examined the reliability of common SL measures in both children and adults. It assessed the reliability of three SL tasks (two auditory and one visual) twice (two months apart) in adults and children (mean age 8 years). Although the tasks showed moderate reliability in adults, they did not capture stable individual variation in children. None of the tasks were reliable across sessions, and all showed internal consistency measures well below psychometric standards. These findings raise significant concerns about the use of current SL measures to predict and explain individual differences in development. The article ends with a discussion of possible explanations for the difference in reliability between children and adults. Keywords Statistical learning. Individual differences. Reliability. Domain generality. Children Infants, children, and adults are constantly exposed to recurring patterns in their environment and manage to learn and generalize from them. This ability-often called statistical learning (SL)-is postulated to be one of the important mechanisms in language learning and in learning more generally (e.g., Erickson & Thiessen, 2015). Statistical learning in infants was demonstrated in a seminal study showing that 8month-old infants can use distributional information about syllable co-occurrence to discover word boundaries (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). This study led to a surge in research probing this ability in both infants and adults. Research over the past 20 years has shown that statistical learning is present from early infancy (Bulf, Johnson, & Valenza, 2011), is found across modalities (visual, auditory, and tactile; Conway & Christiansen, 2005; Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson, 2002), and can be used to learn a range of linguistic properties (e.g., phonetic categories, word order, and phrase structure; see Romberg & Saffran, 2010, for a review). These studies, which as...

Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a wh-phrase in front of a syntactically “superior” wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions, e.g. What did who buy? More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e.g. Which toys did which parents buy? Evidence from acceptability and self-paced reading experiments demonstrates that (i) judgments and processing times for Superiority violations vary in parallel, as determined by the kind of wh-phrases they contain, (ii) judgments increase with exposure while processing times decrease, (iii) reading times are highly predictive of acceptability judgments for the same items, and (iv) the effects of the complexity of the wh-phrases combine in both acceptability judgments and reading times. This evidence supports the conclusion that D-linking effects are likely reducible to independently motivated cognitive mechanisms whose effects emerge in a wide range of sentence contexts. This in turn suggests that Superiority effects, in general, may owe their character to differential processing difficulty.*