During language acquisition, children are tasked with the challenge of determining which words can appear in which syntactic constructions. This has been long recognized as a learnability paradox. On one hand, there are generalizations that children must learn. On the other hand, language is known for its arbitrariness, so children also need to…

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…

Testing of previously studied information potentiates subsequent learning of new information, a phenomenon referred to as the "forward testing effect" (FTE). The current study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectory of the FTE and whether the reset-of-encoding process contributes to the FTE. Younger children, older children,…

In this study, we investigated the learning of indexical features by English-speaking adults using a novel experimental paradigm. In a conceptual replication of Rácz, Hay, and Pierrehumbert (2017), participants learned an allomorphy pattern cued by a given social context. The social contexts were represented by conversation partners who differed…

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…

The learning-style theory of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (Qian, Lipkin, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5:77, 2011) states that ASD individuals differ from neurotypics in the way they learn and store information about the environment and its structure. ASD would rather adopt a "lookup-table" strategy (LUT: memorizing each…

This article investigates whether explicit instruction can affect second language (L2) competence in the domain of English quantifier scope. An intervention study was conducted with L1-Mandarin L2-English learners in order to examine (1) whether these learners can learn inverse scope for the structure on which they are instructed…

Using the artificial language paradigm, we studied the acquisition of morphophonemic alternations with exceptions by 160 German adult learners. We tested the acquisition of two types of alternations in two regularity conditions while additionally varying length of training. In the first alternation, a vowel harmony, backness of the stem vowel…

A well-known challenge for language learners is that the input is typically produced by a variety of speakers, each with distinct vocal characteristics (Liberman, Harris, Hoffman, & Griffith, 1957). Accordingly, many studies have indicated that talker variability leads to processing costs for learners across the lifespan (Jusczyk & Pisoni,…

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…

The purpose of the current study was to explore the use of overt and covert self-rules in the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of a chained task by adults with mild developmental disabilities. This research differed from previous research in that the experimenter did not deliver reinforcement for correct responses during training, and…

This booklet discusses the importance to adolescents and adults with mental retardation of learning how to respond correctly to the many variations in home, work, and community activities in order to be successful in integrated settings. The difficulties individuals with mental retardation have in generalizing skills learned in one situation to a…

Investigated degree to which two shape dimensions were represented categorically by children and adults when learning object names. Found that adults accepted names more often to objects that fell within proposed shape boundaries than to objects that crossed boundaries. Children were just as likely to generalize names to novel objects that fell…

Analyses of sentence combination data from 33 adult learners of English as a Second Language instructed in sentence combination tasks yielded inconclusive results as to whether implicational generalization (IG) is unidirectional to hierarchy levels implicated by the instructed level. The results suggest that IG is clearly not uniformly maximal to…