Despite the empirical evidence for the power of the cognitive capacity of implicit learning of structures and regularities in several modalities and materials, it remains controversial whether implicit learning extends to the learning of temporal structures and regularities. We investigated whether (a) an artificial grammar can be learned equally…

The structure of natural languages give rise to many dependencies in the linear sequences of words, and within words themselves. Detecting these dependencies is arguably critical for young children in learning the underlying structure of their language. There is considerable evidence that human adults and infants are sensitive to the statistical…

Several studies used artificial language (AL) learning paradigms to investigate structural priming between languages in early phases of learning. The presence of such priming would indicate that these languages share syntactic representations. Muylle et al. (2020a) found similar priming of transitives and ditransitives between Dutch (SVO order)…

Language is infinitely productive because syntax defines dependencies between grammatical categories of words and constituents, so there is interchangeability of these words and constituents within syntactic structures. Previous laboratory-based studies of language learning have shown that complex language structures like hierarchical center…

High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support…

Two experiments explored learning, generalization, and the influence of semantics on orthographic processing in an artificial language. In Experiment 1, 16 adults learned to read 36 novel words written in novel characters. Posttraining, participants discriminated trained from untrained items and generalized to novel items, demonstrating extraction…

G. S. Dell, K. D. Reed, D. R. Adams, and A. S. Meyer (2000) proposed a "breadth-of-constraint" continuum on phoneme errors, using artificial experiment-wide constraints to investigate a putative middle ground between local and language-wide constraints. The authors report 5 experiments that test the idea of the continuum and the location of the…