Wonnacott, Elizabeth, Brown, Helen and Nation, Kate (2013) Comparing generalisation in children and adults learning an artificial language. In: Child Language Seminar, Manchester, UK, 24-25 Jun 2013

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Abstract

Successful language acquisition involves generalization, but learners must balance this against the acquisition of lexical constraints. Examples occur throughout language. For example, English native speakers know that certain noun-adjective combinations are impermissible (e.g., strong winds, high winds, strong breezes, *high breezes). Another example is the restrictions imposed by verb sub-categorization (e.g., I gave/sent/threw the
ball to him; I gave/sent/threw him the ball; I donated/carried/pushed the ball to him; * I
donated/carried/pushed him the ball; Baker, 1979). A central debate has been the extent
to which learning such patterns depends on semantic cues (Pinker, 1989) and/or distributional statistics (Braine et al., 1990). The current experiments extend previous work which used Artificial Language learning to
demonstrate that adults (Wonnacott et al., 2008) and 6 year olds (Wonnacott, 2011) are able to learn lexically based restrictions on generalization using distributional statistics.
Here we directly compare the two age groups learning the same artificial language, with a view to exploring maturational differences in language learning. In addition to manipulating frequency (across high and low frequency items) and quantity of exposure (across days),
languages were constructed such that a word’s semantic class was helpful for learning the restrictions for some types of lexical items, but potentially misleading for others.

Item Type:	Conference Item (Poster)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology P Language and Literature > PM Hyperborean, Indian, and Artificial languages
Divisions:	Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Languages, Artificial -- Study and teaching -- Psychological aspects, Language acquisition, Language acquisition -- Age factors, Psycholinguistics
Official Date:	2013
Dates:	Date Event 2013 UNSPECIFIED
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Conference Paper Type:	Poster
Title of Event:	Child Language Seminar
Type of Event:	Other
Location of Event:	Manchester, UK
Date(s) of Event:	24-25 Jun 2013

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