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John N. Williams; Yuyan Xue – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2024
Is it possible to acquire a sensitivity to a regularity in language without intending to and without awareness of what it is? In this conceptual replication and extension of an earlier study (Williams, 2005) participants were trained on a semiartificial language in which determiner choice was dependent on noun animacy. Participants who did not…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Artificial Languages, Intuition, Nouns
Radulescu, Silvia; Wijnen, Frank; Avrutin, Sergey – Language Learning and Development, 2020
From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, Language Acquisition, Grammar, Learning Processes
Denby, Thomas; Schecter, Jeffrey; Arn, Sean; Dimov, Svetlin; Goldrick, Matthew – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2018
Phonotactics--constraints on the position and combination of speech sounds within syllables--are subject to statistical differences that gradiently affect speaker and listener behavior (e.g., Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). What statistical properties drive the acquisition of such constraints? Because they are naturally highly correlated, previous…
Descriptors: Phonology, Probability, Learning Processes, Syllables
von Koss Torkildsen, Janne; Dailey, Natalie S.; Aguilar, Jessica M.; Gomez, Rebecca; Plante, Elena – Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2013
Purpose: Even without explicit instruction, learners are able to extract information about the form of a language simply by attending to input that reflects the underlying grammar. In this study, the authors explored the role of variability in this learning by asking whether varying the number of unique exemplars heard by the learner affects…
Descriptors: Grammar, Linguistic Input, Syntax, Learning Disabilities
Paciorek, Albertyna; Williams, John N. – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2015
Despite many years of investigation into implicit learning in nonlinguistic domains, the potential for implicit learning to deliver the kinds of generalizations that underlie natural language competence remains unclear. In a series of experiments, we investigated implicit learning of the semantic preferences of novel verbs, specifically, whether…
Descriptors: Semantics, Generalization, Verbs, Nouns
Endress, Ansgar D.; Hauser, Marc D. – Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2011
Rules, and exceptions to such rules, are ubiquitous in many domains, including language. Here we used simple artificial grammars to investigate the influence of 2 factors on the acquisition of rules and their exceptions, namely type frequency (the relative numbers of different exceptions to different regular items) and token frequency (the number…
Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Language Processing, Language Acquisition, Familiarity
Gerken, LouAnn – Cognition, 2010
Previous work demonstrated that 9-month-olds who were familiarized with 3-syllable strings consistent with both a broader (AAB or ABA) and narrower (AA"di" or A"di"A) generalization made only the latter. Because the narrower generalization is a subset of the broader one, any example that is consistent with the broader generalization but not the…
Descriptors: Auditory Stimuli, Infants, Decision Making, Generalization

Brooks, Patricia J.; Tomasello, Michael; Dodson, Kelly; Lewis, Lawrence B. – Child Development, 1999
Examined children's tendency to make argument structure overgeneralization errors. Found that 3- to 8-year-olds were more likely to overgeneralize verbs less familiar to them, supporting the hypothesis that verb usage in particular construction types becomes entrenched over time. As children learn transitivity status of particular verbs, they…
Descriptors: Child Language, Familiarity, Generalization, Language Acquisition
Abbot-Smith, Kirsten; Lieven, Elena; Tomasello, Michael – Developmental Science, 2004
Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers and Tomasello's finding, but using a much lower frequency of transitive verbs and models in…
Descriptors: Semantics, Verbs, Familiarity, Syntax