Contending with talker variability has been found to lead to processing costs but also benefits by focusing learners on invariant properties of the signal, indicating that talker variability acts as a desirable difficulty. That is, talker variability may lead to initial costs followed by long-term benefits for retention and generalization. Adult…

This study investigated how much practice is necessary for learners to attain durable second language (L2) grammar knowledge. Using digital flashcards, 119 participants practiced translating 12 sentences into an artificial language, followed by feedback, until they had typed all sentences correctly. Participants repeated this activity in one, two,…

Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a single language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, when expressing ownership relation, English allows infinite embedding of the prenominal genitive "-s," whereas the…

Multiword units play an important role in language learning and use. It was proposed that learning from such units can facilitate mastery of certain grammatical relations, and that children and adults differ in their use of multiword units during learning, contributing to their varying language-learning trajectories. Accordingly, adults learn…

Despite OT's success, opaque alternations prove difficult to capture with constraints, and some violate the theory's formal restrictions. Here, I propose a novel account of opacity drawing upon developments in psychology. Rather than one grammar, I propose a dual-system model with implicit and explicit mechanisms, a domain-specific OT-like system…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate implicit learning in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) by employing a visual artificial grammar learning task. Method: Thirteen children with DLD and 24 children with typical language development between the ages of 8 and 12 years completed a visual artificial grammar learning…

For many people, learning a second language as an adult is a challenging endeavor. Much interest in the study of adult second language learning has concerned the type of input that learners receive in their second language, with findings suggesting that second language learners are often exposed to a register of speech called 'foreigner talk' that…

It has been suggested that external and/or internal limitations paradoxically may lead to superior learning, that is, the concepts of "starting small" and "less is more" (Elman, 1993; Newport, 1990). In this paper, we explore the type of incremental ordering during training that might help learning, and what mechanism explains…

Understanding how native speakers acquire the phonological patterns in their language is a key task for the field of phonology. Numerous studies have suggested that phonological learning is a biased process: certain phonological patterns are easily accessed and learned by the speakers, while others show acquisition difficulties. These differences…

Learning new languages is a complex task involving both explicit and implicit processes (i.e., that do/do not involve awareness). Understanding how these processes interact is essential to a full account of second language (L2) learning, but accounts vary as to whether explicit processes help (e.g., DeKeyser, 2007), hinder (e.g., Ellis &…

It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn potentially due to their conceptual naturalness. Prior work supports this hypothesis in phonology, morphology and syntax but has not addressed semantics. This work aims to unravel the potential factors that contribute to the learnability and the…

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…

Purpose: The current study examined the role of attention and language ability in nonverbal rule induction performance in a demographically diverse sample of school-age children. Method: The participants included 43 English-speaking monolingual and 65 Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 5 and 9 years. Core Language Index…

Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward "category clustering" is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one…

This study investigates how implicit and explicit learning and knowledge are associated, by focusing on the salience of target form--meaning connections. The participants were engaged in incidental learning of artificial determiner systems that included grammatical rules of [± plural] (a taught rule), [± actor] (a more salient hidden rule), and [±…