As children learn their mother tongues, they make systematic errors. For example, English-speaking children regularly say mouses rather than mice . Because children’s errors are not explicitly corrected, it has been argued that children could never learn to make the transition to adult language based on the evidence available to them, and thus that learning even simple aspects of grammar is logically impossible without recourse to innate, language-specific constraints. Here, we examine the role children’s expectations play in language learning and present a model of plural noun learning that generates a surprising prediction: at a given point in learning, exposure to regular plurals (e.g. rats ) can decrease children’s tendency to overregularize irregular plurals (e.g. mouses ). Intriguingly, the model predicts that the same exposure should have the opposite effect earlier in learning. Consistent with this, we show that testing memory for items with regular plural labels contributes to a decrease in irregular plural overregularization in six-year-olds, but to an increase in four-year-olds. Our model and results suggest that children’s overregularization errors both arise and resolve themselves as a consequence of the distribution of error in the linguistic environment, and that far from presenting a logical puzzle for learning, they are inevitable consequences of it.
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Words are often seen as the core representational units of language use, and the basic building blocks of language learning. Here, we provide novel empirical evidence for the role of multiword sequences in language learning by showing that, like words, multiword phrases show age-of-acquisition (AoA) effects. Words that are acquired earlier in childhood show processing advantages in adults on a variety of tasks. AoA effects highlight the role of words in the developing language system and illustrate the lasting impact of early-learned material on adult processing. Here, we show that such effects are not limited to single words: multiword phrases that are learned earlier in childhood are also easier to process in adulthood. In two reaction time studies, we show that adults respond faster to early-acquired phrases (categorized using corpus measures and subjective ratings) compared to later-acquired ones. The effect is not reducible to adult frequencies, plausibility, or lexical AoA. Like words, early-acquired phrases enjoy a privileged status in the adult language system. These findings further highlight the parallels between words and larger patterns, demonstrate the role of multiword units in learning, and provide novel support for models of language where units of varying sizes serve as building blocks for language.
Second-language learners rarely arrive at native proficiency in a number of linguistic domains, including morphological and syntactic processing. Previous approaches to understanding the different outcomes of first- versus second-language learning have focused on cognitive and neural factors. In contrast, we explore the possibility that children and adults may rely on different linguistic units throughout the course of language learning, with specific focus on the granularity of those units. Following recent psycholinguistic evidence for the role of multiword chunks in online language processing, we explore the hypothesis that children rely more heavily on multiword units in language learning than do adults learning a second language. To this end, we take an initial step toward using large-scale, corpus-based computational modeling as a tool for exploring the granularity of speakers' linguistic units. Employing a computational model of language learning, the Chunk-Based Learner, we compare the usefulness of chunk-based knowledge in accounting for the speech of second-language learners versus children and adults speaking their first language. Our findings suggest that while multiword units are likely to play a role in second-language learning, adults may learn less useful chunks, rely on them to a lesser extent, and arrive at them through different means than children learning a first language.
In recent years, psycholinguistic studies have built support for the notion that formulaic language is more widespread and pervasive in adult sentence processing than previously assumed. These findings are mirrored in a number of developmental studies, suggesting that children's item-based units do not diminish, but persist into adulthood, in keeping with a number of approaches emerging from cognitive linguistics. In the present paper, we describe a simple, psychologically motivated computational model of language acquisition in which the learning and use of formulaic expressions represents the foundation for comprehension and production processes. The model is shown to capture key psycholinguistic findings on children's sensitivity to the properties of multiword strings and use of lexically specific multiword frames in morphological development. The results of these simulations, we argue, stress the importance of adopting a developmental perspective to better understand how formulaic expressions come to play an important role in adult language use.
Research has shown that contoids (phonetically defined consonants) may provide more robust and reliable cues to syllable and word boundaries than vocoids (phonetically defined vowels). Recent studies of Danish, a language characterized by frequent long sequences of vocoids in speech, have suggested that the reduced occurrence of contoids may make speech in it intrinsically harder to segment than in closely related languages such as Norwegian. We addressed this hypothesis empirically in an artificial language learning experiment with native speakers of Danish, Norwegian, and English. We tested whether artificial speech consisting of concatenated contoid–vocoid syllables is easier to segment than speech consisting of vocoid–vocoid syllables where the first segment is a semivowel and the second a full vowel. Contrary to what was expected, we found no effect of the phonetic makeup of the syllables on speech segmentability. Possible interpretations and implications of this result are discussed. Open Practices This article has been awarded Open Materials and Open Data badges. All materials and data are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/rmjtg. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.
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