The burgeoning field of third language (L3) acquisition has increasingly focused on intermediate stages of language development, aiming to establish the groundwork for comprehensive models of L3 learning that encompass the entire developmental sequence. This article underscores the importance of a robust epistemological foundation, advocating for…

Infants are sensitive to syllable co-occurrence probabilities when segmenting words from fluent speech. However, segmenting two languages overlapping at the syllabic level is challenging because the statistical cues across the languages are incongruent. Successful segmentation, thus, relies on infants' ability to separate language inputs and track…

Natural languages contain systematic relationships between verb meaning and verb argument structure. Artificial language learning studies typically remove those relationships and instead pair verb meanings randomly with structures. Adult participants in such studies can detect statistical regularities associated with words in these languages and…

Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on…

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…

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) "language universals." One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this…

Bilinguals' two languages are both active in parallel, and controlling co-activation is one of bilinguals' principle challenges. Trilingualism multiplies this challenge. To investigate how third language (L3) learners manage interference between languages, Spanish-English bilinguals were taught an artificial language that conflicted with English…

The present experiments investigated the flexibility of statistical word segmentation. There is ample evidence that infants can use statistical cues (e.g., syllable transitional probabilities) to segment fluent speech. However, it is unclear how effectively infants track these patterns in unfamiliar phonological systems. We examined whether…