Learning language requires acquiring the grammatical categories of words in the language, but learning those categories requires understanding the role of words in the syntax. In this study, we examined how this chicken and egg problem is resolved by learners of an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives, and case markers following…

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 &…

New linguistic information must be integrated into our existing language system. Using a novel experimental task that incorporates a syntactic priming paradigm into artificial language learning, we investigated how new grammatical regularities and words are learned. This innovation allowed us to control the language input the learner received,…

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…

The current study aims to make an initial neuroimaging contribution to central implicit-explicit issues in second language (L2) acquisition by considering how implicit and explicit contexts mediate the neural representation of L2. Focusing on implicit contexts, the study employs a longitudinal design to examine the neural representation of L2…

Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an…

Artificial grammar learning constitutes a well-established model for the acquisition of grammatical knowledge in a natural setting. Previous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that Broca's area (left BA 44/45) is similarly activated by natural syntactic processing and artificial grammar learning. The current study was conducted to investigate the…

Although the role of the striatum in language processing is still largely unclear, a number of recent proposals have outlined its specific contribution. Different studies report evidence converging to a picture where the striatum may be involved in those aspects of rule-application requiring non-automatized behaviour. This is the main…

The first of three articles on the ways in which people formulate their observations, this paper considers the basic assumptions of both syntactic and paradigmatic models of cognition and their applications in natural (i.e., human) and artificial (i.e., computer) information processing. The analysis begins with background information on the nature…