Do Kindergarteners Develop Awareness of the Statistical Regularities They Acquire?

Abstract

Many studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Although statistical learning is not necessarily implicit in nature, it is often defined as learning that happens without awareness. This article investigates whether statistical learning in young children is indeed implicit, as often assumed. We trained 63 kindergarteners on a miniature language and assessed learning using a picture-matching task. We used an opt-out task to measure whether the kindergarteners possessed awareness of an acquired meaningful grammatical marker. In the opt-out paradigm, participants demonstrate awareness by expressing uncertainty through a nonverbal response: opting out. Our results are compatible with an earlier study of which the present study is a partial replication, suggesting that kindergarteners can acquire this marker from distributional properties in the input. Furthermore, although none of the children could verbalize knowledge of the structure during exit interviews, their behavior during the opt-out task indicated that they developed awareness of it.This study is part of the PhD project "Meta-linguistic Awareness in Early (Second) Language Acquisition," which is funded by the University of Amsterdam. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. The authors would like to thank Dirk-Jan Vet, Tiffany Boersma, Channa van Dijk, Afra Klarenbeek, Klaas Seinhorst, Joris Wolterbeek, and Joanna den Blijker for their help with constructing the experiment, three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and the participating schools for their hospitality. The long time between acceptance and publication is due to issues with making the earlier study that informed the current study available.

The Effect of Explicit Instruction on Implicit and Explicit Linguistic Knowledge in Kindergartners

“…To test whether children can make use of explicit learning mechanisms through explicit instruction, we investigated whether explicit instruction influences the acquisition of a morpho-syntactic agreement marker in kindergartners. We used the artificial language learning design from Spit et al (2020);(2021), in which we tested whether kindergartners could learn a grammatical marker expressing a plurality feature from mere exposure. In the current experiment we compared kindergartners who had to learn this marker from exposure only with kindergartners who received not only exposure, but also explicit instruction about this marker.…”

“…We used the artificial language from Spit et al (2020);(2021), which consisted of four proper names, 3 verbs, 2 grammatical markers, s6 frequent nouns, 12 infrequent nouns and one conjunction. 1 The language had subject-verb-object word order.…”

“…This proved frustrating, however, because most children had difficulties learning all nouns from the limited input they received. Therefore, it was problematic to keep the vocabulary training as it was, and it was altered from the test in Spit et al (2021), as it is in this study. The vocabulary test was included to familiarize participants with the picture matching task, and participants did not receive any input to the grammatical regularity at this point.…”

“…In our previous experiment, we observed a tendency toward better performance by children in the attention task condition. Therefore, we decided to include the attention task for all children in Spit et al (2021) and the current study. (3) In Spit et al (2021) the experiment ended with an opt out phase, in which we assessed whether children developed awareness of the grammatical regularity.…”

“…Therefore, we decided to include the attention task for all children in Spit et al (2021) and the current study. (3) In Spit et al (2021) the experiment ended with an opt out phase, in which we assessed whether children developed awareness of the grammatical regularity. It came after the picture matching task and could not have affected performance on this task.…”