Search

There is ample evidence that individual‐level cognitive mechanisms active during language learning and use can contribute to the evolution of language. For example, experimental work suggests that learners will reduce case marking in a language where grammatical roles are reliably indicated by fixed word order, a correlation found robustly in the languages of the world. However, such research often assumes homogeneity among language learners and users, or at least does not dig into individual differences in behavior. Yet, it is increasingly clear that language users vary in a large number of ways: in culture, in demographics, and—critically for present purposes—in terms of cognitive diversity. Here, we explore how neurodiversity impacts behavior in an experimental task similar to the one summarized above, and how this behavior interacts with social pressures. We find both similarities and differences between autistic and nonautistic English‐speaking individuals, suggesting that neurodiversity can impact language change in the lab. This, in turn, highlights the potential for future research on the role of neurodivergent populations in language evolution more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A foundational goal of linguistics has been to understand why languages look the way they do. A range of possible explanations exist – from domain-specific representations to cognition-external factors like history and grammaticalization – and all of these undoubtedly play some role. But determining exactly how these link with specific features of language remains challenging, and the role of domain-specific mechanisms has been particularly contentious. In this paper, I highlight a growing new approach, which uses artificial language experiments to link individual-level biases to cross-linguistic trends in language structure. Using word and morpheme order as case studies, I will show how a range of different paradigms and learner populations allow us to make progress on this crucial issue in linguistics. I will focus on typological trends in word and morpheme order. For some ordering trends, experimental evidence points to variation across populations, suggesting that the best explanation for these patterns likely has its root in language history and grammaticalization. In other cases, the evidence points to the role of universal but domain-general cognitive biases, like transparency and simplicity. These domain-general biases interact with linguistic representations in important ways. Taken together these studies help adjudicate between alternative explanations for a number of specific ordering patterns and suggest a new sense of domain-specificity in the evolution of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical redundancy is a widespread feature across languages. Although redundant cues can be seen to increase the complexity and processing burden of structures, it has been suggested that they can assist language acquisition. Here, we explored if this learning benefit can be observed from the very initial stages of second language (L2) acquisition and whether the effect of redundancy is modulated by the perceptual salience of the redundant linguistic cues. Across two experiments, three groups of adult native speakers of English were incidentally exposed to three different artificial languages; one that had a fixed word order, Verb-Object-Subject, and two in which thematic role assignment was additionally determined by a low-salient (Experiment 1) or a high-salient (Experiment 2) redundant case marker. While all groups managed to learn the novel language, our results pointed towards a hindering role of redundancy, with participants in the non-redundant condition achieving greater learning outcomes compared to those in both redundant conditions. Results also revealed that this impeding effect of redundancy on L2 learners can be attenuated by the salience of the redundant cue (Experiment 2). In conjunction with earlier findings, the present results suggest that the effect of redundancy on L2 acquisition can be differentially manifested depending on the stage of L2 development, learners' first language biases and age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General principles of human cognition can help to explain why languages are more likely to have certain characteristics than others: structures that are difficult to process or produce will tend to be lost over time. One aspect of cognition that is implicated in language use is working memory--the component of short-term memory used for temporary storage and manipulation of information. In this study, we consider the relationship between working memory and regularization of linguistic variation. Regularization is a well-documented process whereby languages become less variable (on some dimension) over time. This process has been argued to be driven by the behavior of individual language users, but the specific mechanism is not agreed upon. Here, we use an artificial language learning experiment to investigate whether limitations in working memory during either language learning or language production drive regularization behavior. We find that taxing working memory during production results in the loss of all types of variation, but the process by which random variation becomes more predictable is better explained by learning biases. A computational model offers a potential explanation for the production effect using a simple self-priming mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experimental study of artificial language learning has become a widely used means of investigating the predictions of theories of language learning and representation. Although much is now known about the generalizations that learners make from various kinds of data, relatively little is known about how those representations affect speech processing. This paper presents an event-related potential (ERP) study of brain responses to violations of lab-learned phonotactics. Novel words that violated a learned phonotactic constraint elicited a larger Late Positive Component (LPC) than novel words that satisfied it. Similar LPCs have been found for violations of natively acquired linguistic structure, as well as for violations of other types of abstract generalizations, such as musical structure. We argue that lab-learned phonotactic generalizations are represented abstractly and affect the evaluation of speech in a manner that is similar to natively acquired syntactic and phonological rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long-standing debate in cognitive science surrounding the source of commonalities among languages of the world. Indeed, there are many potential explanations for such commonalities—accidents of history, common processes of language change, memory limitations, constraints on linguistic representations, and so on. Recent research has used psycholinguistic experiments to provide empirical evidence linking common linguistic patterns to specific features of human cognition, but these experiments tend to use English speakers, who in many cases have direct experience with the common patterns of interest. Here we highlight the importance of testing populations whose languages go against cross-linguistic trends. We investigate whether adult monolingual speakers of Kîîtharaka, which has an unusual way of ordering words, mirror the word-order preferences of English speakers. We find that they do, supporting the hypothesis that universal cognitive representations play a role in shaping word order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In language learning, learners engage with their environment, incorporating cues from different sources. However, in lab‐based experiments, using artificial languages, many of the cues and features that are part of real‐world language learning are stripped away. In three experiments, we investigated the role of positive, negative, and mixed feedback on the gradual learning of language‐like statistical regularities within an active guessing game paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants received deterministic feedback (100%), whereas probabilistic feedback (i.e., 75% or 50%) was introduced in Experiment 2. Finally, Experiment 3 explored the impact of mixed probabilistic feedback (33% positive, 33% negative, 33% no feedback). The results showed that cross‐situational learning of words was observed without feedback, but participants were able to learn structural regularities of the miniature language only when feedback was provided. Interestingly, the presence of positive feedback was particularly helpful for the learner, promoting more in‐depth learning of the artificial language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical redundancy is a widespread feature across languages. Although redundant cues can be seen to increase the complexity and processing burden of structures, it has been suggested that they can assist language acquisition. Here, we explored if this learning benefit can be observed from the very initial stages of second language (L2) acquisition and whether the effect of redundancy is modulated by the perceptual salience of the redundant linguistic cues. Across two experiments, three groups of adult native speakers of English were incidentally exposed to three different artificial languages; one that had a fixed word order, Verb-Object-Subject, and two in which thematic role assignment was additionally determined by a low-salient (Experiment 1) or a high-salient (Experiment 2) redundant case marker. While all groups managed to learn the novel language, our results pointed towards a hindering role of redundancy, with participants in the non-redundant condition achieving greater learning outcomes compared to those in both redundant conditions. Results also revealed that this impeding effect of redundancy on L2 learners can be attenuated by the salience of the redundant cue (Experiment 2). In conjunction with earlier findings, the present results suggest that the effect of redundancy on L2 acquisition can be differentially manifested depending on the stage of L2 development, learners’ first language biases and age.

Inverse probability adaptation effects (the finding that encountering a verb in an unexpected structure increases long-term priming for that structure) have been observed in both L1 and L2 speakers. However, participants in these studies all had established representations of the syntactic structures to be primed. It therefore remains an open question whether inverse probability adaptation effects could take place with newly encountered L2 structures. In a pre-registered experiment, we exposed participants (n = 84) to an artificial language with active and passive constructions. Training on Day 1 established expectations for specific co-occurrence patterns between verbs and structures. On Day 2, established patterns were violated for the surprisal group (n = 42), but not for the control group (n = 42). We observed no immediate priming effects from exposure to high-surprisal items. On Day 3, however, we observed an effect of input variation on comprehension of verb meaning in an auditory grammaticality judgment task. The surprisal group showed higher accuracy for passive structures in both tasks, suggesting that experiencing variation during learning had promoted the recognition of optionality in the target language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, the question of to which linguistic cues learners pay attention when they decode a new language has been subject to controversy in the field of third language (L3) acquisition. In this article, we present an artificial language learning experiment that investigated how lexical and syntactic similarities between an artificial L3 and preexisting grammars impact crosslinguistic influence at the very beginning of the acquisition process. We exposed four groups of 30 Norwegian–English bilinguals each to one of four L3s and gave them training in that L3. The participants gave forced‐choice acceptability judgments on pairs of nonsubject‐initial declarative clauses that differed in word order, one grammatical in English, the other grammatical in Norwegian. The participants had not been exposed to nonsubject‐initial declaratives during the exposure and training phases to avoid confounds with learning. The results showed that both lexical and syntactic similarities affect crosslinguistic influence. We discuss this result considering contemporary accounts of L3 acquisition. A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in non‐technical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the emergence of sociolinguistic indexicality using an artificial‐language‐learning paradigm. Sociolinguistic indexicality involves the association of linguistic variants with nonlinguistic social or contextual features. Any linguistic variant can acquire "constellations" of such indexical meanings, though they also exhibit an ordering, with first‐order indices associated with particular speaker groups and higher‐order indices targeting stereotypical attributes of those speakers. Much natural‐language research has been conducted on this phenomenon, but little experimental work has focused on how indexicality emerges. Here, we present three miniature artificial‐language experiments designed to break ground on this question. Results show ready formation of first‐order indexicality based on co‐occurrence alone, with higher‐order indexicality emerging as a result of extension to new speaker groups, modulated by the perceived practical importance of the indexed social feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates substantive bias, a phenomenon wherein learners exhibit a preference for phonetically motivated patterns in language acquisition. The study presents evidence that variable input, rather than categorical input, can activate substantive bias. Native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese were randomly assigned to categorical or variable training conditions for vowel backness harmony or disharmony, or to a no-training control condition. Results indicate that participants in the categorical and control conditions did not exhibit a bias towards either pattern. However, participants in the variable conditions displayed a bias towards vowel harmony, suggesting that input variability can strengthen the effect of substantive bias. These findings contribute to our comprehension of the role of input variability in phonological learning and the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of phonetically motivated and unmotivated phonological patterns.

Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same position (e.g., all subject agreement markers as suffixes, all object agreement markers as prefixes). However, little is known about the exceptions to this trend: cases where different values of the same feature are marked in different positions in the word (i.e., positional splits). In this study, we explore the positional properties of subject and object person-number agreement markers in a phylogenetically diverse sample of 227 languages. We find that the recurrence of a positional split is proportional to its degree of naturalness, that is, to the amount of shared feature values amongst the forms with the same positional arrangement. Natural patterns (e.g., where prefixal forms all share SG and suffixal forms all share PL) are over-represented in natural languages compared to a random baseline. The most unnatural patterns are underrepresented, and splits with an intermediate level of unnaturalness occur at around chance levels. We hypothesise that this graded bias for naturalness is grounded in a preference for morphological similarity amongst semantically similar forms during language learning. To test this hypothesis we conducted two online artificial language learning experiments where we trained and tested participants on person-number verbal agreement paradigms of different sizes with positional splits of different degrees of naturalness. We found that their relative learnability is also gradient, again proportional to the amount of feature value overlap, thus matching the observed cross-linguistic tendencies. Our findings support the notion that semantic similarity shapes the evolution of morphological structure in person-number verbal agreement systems and that it does so in a gradient way.

Sound correspondences (SCs) have been found to be learnable phonological patterns in second dialect acquisition. Cross-linguistically, SCs consist of similar as well as distinct variants. However, in the study of SC learning, the effect of the similarity between the corresponding variants remains understudied. The salience hypothesis proposes that distinct dialect variants are more salient and learnable, while the learning bias hypothesis in phonological learning predicts that SC patterns with similar variants are preferred by learners. We conducted an artificial language learning experiment to test how sound similarity affects SC learning. Specifically, the degrees of similarity between variants were evaluated from multidimensional metrics, including phonetic and phonological measures, which are cross-validated with typological evidence. While there was no effect of variant similarity in learning simple one-to-one SCs, a preference for the most distinct dialect variant was found in the learning of SCs exhibiting more complex mapping structures (i.e., two-to-one and one-to-two). Our results confirm a preference for distinct variants in SC learning, although this effect relies on two conditions. First, the preference for distinction emerges only in the presence of complex mapping structures. Second, this preference requires an activation threshold, in that the distance of the SC must be sufficiently large to trigger the effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial language learning research has become a popular tool to investigate universal mechanisms in language learning. However, often it is unclear whether the found effects are due to learning, or due to artefacts of the native language or the artificial language, and whether findings in only one language will generalise to speakers of other languages. The present study offers a new approach to model the influence of both the L1 and the target artificial language on language learning. The idea is to control for linguistic factors of the artificial and the native language by incorporating measures of wordlikeness into the statistical analysis as covariates. To demonstrate the approach, we extend Linzen and Gallagher (2017)’s study on consonant identity pattern to evaluate whether speakers of German and Mandarin rapidly learn the pattern when influences of L1 and the artificial language are accounted for by incorporating measures assessed by analogical and discriminative learning models over the L1 and artificial lexicon. Results show that nonwords are more likely to be accepted as grammatical if they are more similar to the trained artificial lexicon and more different from the L1 and, crucially, the identity effect is still present. The proposed approach is helpful for designing cross-linguistic studies.

Response particles, like English ‘yes’ and ‘no’, are used to respond to polar questions or assertions and are found in all languages. However, the number of particles and the specific meanings they convey vary across languages. For example, in some languages particles mainly convey whether the response itself is positive or negative, while in others they convey whether the response is agreeing or disagreeing with previous discourse. Further, some languages have two response particles, while others have three, or even four. Recent work suggests that how meanings tend to be mapped to forms cross-linguistically might nevertheless be constrained. Roelofsen & Farkas (2015) suggest that indicating disagreement with a negative question or assertion (e.g., A: ‘Ally doesn’t eat meat.’ B: ‘Yes, he does.’) is more marked than indicating agreement with a positive assertion (e.g., A: ‘Ally eats meat.’ B: ‘Yes, he does’.). This difference in semantic markedness is argued to lead to a difference in form: more marked meanings are mapped to more specialized forms. Here we investigate this hypothesis in a series of behavioral experiments. Across our experiments, we find that participants are indeed sensitive to the differences in meaning that particles can convey. However, not all of the differences implicated by the hierarchy hypothesized in Roelofsen & Farkas (2015) are supported by our results, and we find evidence highlighting an unexpected special role for Positive Agreement—the least marked meaning.

In traditional, generative phonology, sound patterns are represented in terms of abstract features, typically based on the articulatory properties of the sounds. The present study makes use of an artificial language learning experiment to explore when and how learners extend a novel phonological pattern to novel segments. Adult, English-speaking learners were exposed to a spirantization pattern in which a stop became a fricative between two vowels (e.g., /bib/ + /o/ ➔ [bivo]). Participants were trained on spirantization for two of four possible stop-fricative pairs, and were tested on their generalization to the held-out segments. Two groups of participants were trained on items based on voicing (e.g., the Voiced condition was trained on /b/ ➔ [v], and /d/ ➔ [z], and tested on /p/ ➔ [f], and /t/ ➔ [s]), and two groups of participants were trained on items based on place of articulation (e.g., the Labial condition was trained on /b/ ➔ [v], and /p/ ➔ [f] and tested on /t/ ➔ [s], and /d/ ➔ [z]). Participants in both Place and Voice conditions were successful at learning and generalizing the spirantization pattern to novel segments, but rates of generalization were higher in the Voice conditions. These results support a similarity-based approach to generalization, particularly one that takes into account articulatorily-based features and natural classes. Implications for phonological theory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over half a century ago, George Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to be older. Corpus studies since then have confirmed this pattern, with more frequent words being replaced and regularized less often than less frequent words. Two main hypotheses have been proposed to explain this: that frequent words change less because selection against innovation is stronger at higher frequencies, or that they change less because stochastic drift is stronger at lower frequencies. Here, we report the first experimental test of these hypotheses. Participants were tasked with learning a miniature language consisting of two nouns and two plural markers. Nouns occurred at different frequencies and were subjected to treatments that varied drift and selection. Using a model that accounts for participant heterogeneity, we measured the rate of noun regularization, the strength of selection, and the strength of drift in participant responses. Results suggest that drift alone is sufficient to generate the elevated rate of regularization we observed in low‐frequency nouns, adding to a growing body of evidence that drift may be a major driver of language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on an artificial language learning experiment testing the learnability of a typologically rare pattern of reduplication. Our model comes from syllable-copy reduplication in Hiaki (aka Yaqui, Uto-Aztecan), a base-dependent pattern wherein the shape of reduplication depends crucially on syllabification in the base: coda consonants can copy in reduplication if and only if there is a corresponding coda in the base. Using a controlled artificial language experiment with a forced-choice paradigm, we show that native English speakers who have no prior exposure to any language with a grammar employing syllable-copy reduplication are in many cases able to learn a variable CV or CVC syllable-copying rule as measured by eventual above-chance selection of the correct form. However, compared to participants learning either a consistent CV or CVC copying rule, the performance of participants tasked with learning such a variable syllable-copying rule improves more slowly, and these participants make more errors overall. We suggest that this difference in learnability may be one of a number of factors helping to explain the typological rarity of certain morphological patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Distinct statistical learning processes drive the link from oral language to reading. • Oral language is predicted by statistical learning to generalise abstract stimuli. • Reading is predicted by statistical learning to generalise via oral language. • Oral language and reading are not predicted by statistical learning to segment speech. • Infant non-adjacent statistical processing predicts childhood language development. Statistical learning ability has been found to relate to children's reading skills. Yet, statistical learning is also known to be vital for developing oral language skills, and oral language and reading skills relate strongly. These connections raise the question of whether statistical learning ability affects reading via oral language or directly. Statistical learning is multifaceted, and so different aspects of statistical learning might influence oral language and reading skills distinctly. In a longitudinal study, we determined how two aspects of statistical learning from an artificial language tested on 70 17-month-old infants—segmenting sequences from speech and generalizing the sequence structure—related to oral language skills measured at 54 months and reading skills measured at approximately 75 months. Statistical learning segmentation did not relate significantly to oral language or reading, whereas statistical learning generalization related to oral language, but only indirectly related to reading. Our results showed that children's early statistical learning ability was associated with learning to read via the children's oral language skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical regularities may correlate with semantics; e.g. grammatical gender is often partially predictable from the noun's semantics. We explore whether learners generalise over semantic cues, and whether the extent of exposure (1 versus 4 sessions) and number of exemplars for each semantic class (type-frequency) affect this. Six-year-olds and adults were exposed to semi-artificial languages where nouns co-occurred with novel particles, with particle usage fully or partially determined by the semantics of the nouns. Both adults and children generalised to novel nouns when semantic cues were fully consistent. Adults (but not children) also generalised when cues were partially consistent. Generalisation increased with exposure, however there was no evidence that increasing type-frequency (i.e. more nouns per semantic class) increased generalisation. Post-experiment interviews also suggested that successful generalisation depended on explicit awareness. These results suggest that semantic cues are particularly difficult for children to exploit during the early stages of language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Person systems convey the roles entities play in the context of speech (e.g., speaker, addressee). As with other linguistic category systems, not all ways of partitioning the person space are equally likely crosslinguistically. Different theories have been proposed to constrain the set of possible person partitions that humans can represent, explaining their typological distribution. This article introduces an artificial language learning methodology to investigate the existence of universal constraints on person systems. We report the results of three experiments that inform these theoretical approaches by generating behavioral evidence for the impact of constraints on the learnability of different person partitions. Our findings constitute the first experimental evidence for learnability differences in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM), where only certain types of grammatical objects are marked with morphological cases. Traditionally, it has been claimed that DOM arises as a way to prevent ambiguity by marking objects that might otherwise be mistaken for subjects (e.g., animate objects). While some recent experimental work supports this account, research on language typology suggests at least one alternative hypothesis. In particular, DOM may instead arise as a way of marking objects that are atypical from the point of view of information structure. According to this account, rather than being marked to avoid ambiguity, objects are marked when they are given (already familiar in the discourse) rather than new. Here, we experimentally investigate this hypothesis using two artificial language learning experiments. We find that information structure impacts participants' object marking, but in an indirect way: atypical information structure leads to a change in word order, which then triggers increased object marking. Interestingly, this staged process of change is compatible with documented cases of DOM emergence. We argue that this process is driven by two cognitive tendencies. First, a tendency to place discourse given information before new information, and second, a tendency to mark noncanonical word order. Taken together, our findings provide corroborating evidence for the role of information structure in the emergence of DOM systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores how language learners apply gender stereotypes in learning a novel language with grammatical gender. Adult, English-speaking participants were exposed to picture–sound pairs from a miniature language. Each picture was of a matched gendered professional (e.g., male tennis player, female tennis player) with a nonsense form [CVCV-go/gu]. Participants were exposed to 32 picture–sound pairs (16 male, and 16 female, all matched) five times in a randomized order. Following training, participants were given a two-alternative forced-choice test with novel picture–word pairs. Participants were presented with a novel picture paired with two words (e.g., [befegu vs. befebo]) and were asked to choose which word most likely portrayed the meaning conveyed by the picture. These novel items contained gender-matched professions (e.g., male and female chemist), neutral items (office supplies), stereotypically female items (makeup), and stereotypically male items (tools). Participants assigned the appropriate gender to the novel professions, and assigned gender in line with the stereotyped objects at a rate significantly greater than chance (but not for neutral items). These results support the hypothesis that learning a language with a binary grammatical gender might be influenced by gender stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether children alter a variable phonological pattern in an artificial language towards a phonetically-natural form. We address acquisition of a variable rounding harmony pattern through the use of two artificial languages; one with dominant harmony pattern, and another with dominant non-harmony pattern. Overall, children favor harmony pattern in their production of the languages. In the language where harmony is non-dominant, children's subsequent production entirely reverses the pattern so that harmony predominates. This differs starkly from adults. Our results compare to the regularization found in child learning of morphosyntactic variation, suggesting a role for naturalness in variable phonological learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two artificial language learning experiments with four groups of highly proficient Basque-Spanish bilinguals and two groups of Spanish monolinguals, we examine the cues that allow adult listeners to parse new input into phrases. In addition, we investigate which factors lead bilinguals to switch between the segmentation strategies characteristic of their two languages. We show that segmental information drives bilinguals' choice of a segmentation strategy when presented with an unfamiliar language. The language in which bilinguals are addressed during the study (i.e. the language of context) additionally modulates their segmentation preference, and this context language effect is found in L1Basque bilinguals but does not extend to L1Spanish bilinguals. The cause of this asymmetry is yet to be established. Finally, we show that adult monolinguals disregard statistical cues in favor of unfamiliar segmental information when in conflict. These results evidence that the available phrase segmentation cues are arranged hierarchically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 generation to the next if each inflectional category has a consistent morphological position. We test this in an online artificial language experiment, teaching adult English speakers a miniature language consisting of noun stems representing shapes and suffixes representing the color and number features of each shape. In one experimental condition, each suffix category has a fixed position, with color in the first position and number in the second position. In a second condition, each specific combination of suffixes has a fixed order, but some combinations have color in the first position, and some have number in the first position. In a third condition, suffixes are randomly ordered on each presentation. While the language in the first condition is consistent with the category clustering principle, those in the other conditions are not. Our results indicate that category clustering of inflectional affixes facilitates morphological learning, at least in adult English speakers. Moreover, we found that languages that violate category clustering but still follow fixed affix ordering patterns are more learnable than languages with random ordering. Altogether, our results provide evidence for individual biases toward category clustering; we suggest that this bias may play a causal role in shaping the typological regularities in affix order we find in natural language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores learning phonological alternations that contain exceptions. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony pattern in which a regular suffix obeyed a vowel harmony rule, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on the back/round phonetic features of the stem, and a non-alternating suffix that was always /o/ regardless of the features of the stem vowel. Participants in Experiment 1 learned the behavior of both suffixes, but correct performance for the non-alternating suffix was higher when the suffix happened to be in harmony with the stem. Participants in Experiment 2 were exposed to the non-alternating affix in harmonic contexts only, and continued to show a bias towards harmony. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 with minimal training on disharmonic cases of the non-alternating morpheme. However, participants were less likely to learn the alternating affix without exposure to morphological stem, stem + suffix alternations in Experiment 4, suggesting a bias towards morphophonological alternations in learning vowel harmony patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of its negative marker (Zeijlstra 2004; Jespersen 1917). For example, one version of this hypothesis argues that languages with affixal negation must be negative concord (Zeijlstra 2008). We use an artificial language learning experiment to investigate whether English speakers are sensitive to the status of the negative marker when learning double negation and negative concord languages. Our findings fail to provide evidence supporting this hypothesised connection. Instead, our results suggest that learners find it easier to learn negative concord languages compared to double negation languages independently of whether the negative marker is an adverb or an affix. This is in line with evidence from natural language acquisition (Thornton et al. 2016). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prediction error is known to enhance priming effects for familiar syntactic structures; it also strengthens the formation of new declarative memories. Here, we investigate whether violating expectations may aid the acquisition of new abstract syntactic structures, too, by enhancing memory for individual instances which can then form the basis for abstraction. In a cross-situational artificial language learning paradigm, participants were exposed to novel syntactic structures in ways that either violated their expectations (Surprisal group) or that conformed to them (Control group). In a delayed post-test, participants were tested on their structural knowledge both by means of structure test trials (cross-situational learning trials focusing on the active / passive distinction, with both familiar and novel verbs), and by a grammaticality judgment task. Participants in the Surprisal group were significantly more accurate than Control on the structure test trials using novel verbs and in the grammaticality judgment task, suggesting they had developed stronger abstract structural knowledge and were better at generalising it to novel instances, even though they were not significantly more likely to become aware of the functional distinction between the two structures.

In order to become proficient native speakers, children have to learn the morpho-syntactic relations between distant elements in a sentence, so-called non-adjacent dependencies (NADs). Previous research suggests that NAD learning in children comprises different developmental stages, where until 2 years of age children are able to learn NADs associatively under passive listening conditions, while starting around the age of 3–4 years children fail to learn NADs during passive listening. To test whether the transition between these developmental stages occurs gradually, we tested children’s NAD learning in a foreign language using event-related potentials (ERPs). We found ERP evidence of NAD learning across the ages of 1, 2 and 3 years. The amplitude of the ERP effect indexing NAD learning, however, decreased with age. These findings might indicate a gradual transition in children’s ability to learn NADs associatively. Cognitively, this transition might be driven by children’s increasing knowledge of their native language, hindering NAD learning in novel contexts. Neuroanatomically, maturation of the prefrontal cortex might play a crucial role, promoting top-down learning, affecting bottom-up, associative learning. In sum, our study suggests that NAD learning under passive listening conditions undergoes a gradual transition between different developmental stages during early childhood.

We investigated L1 and L2 frequency effects in the sharing of syntax across languages (reflected in cross-linguistic structural priming) using an artificial language (AL) paradigm. Ninety-six Dutch speakers learned an AL with either a prepositional-object (PO) dative bias (PO datives appeared three times as often as double-object [DO] datives) or a DO dative bias (DOs appeared three times as often as POs). Priming was assessed from the AL to Dutch (a strongly PO-biased language). There was weak immediate priming for DOs, but not for POs in both bias conditions. This suggests that L1, but not AL, frequency influenced immediate priming. Furthermore, the DO bias group produced 10% more DOs in Dutch than the PO bias group, showing that cumulative priming was influenced by AL frequency. We discuss the different effects of L1 and AL frequency on cross-linguistic structural priming in terms of lexicalist and implicit learning accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the connection between the cultural evolution of a language and the rapid processing response to that language in the brains of individual learners? In an iterated communication study that was conducted previously, participants were asked to communicate temporal concepts such as "tomorrow," "day after," "year," and "past" using vertical movements recorded on a touch screen. Over time, participants developed simple artificial 'languages' that used space metaphorically to communicate in nuanced ways about time. Some conventions appeared rapidly and universally (e.g., using larger vertical movements to convey greater temporal durations). Other conventions required extensive social interaction and exhibited idiosyncratic variation (e.g., using vertical location to convey past or future). Here we investigate whether the brain's response during acquisition of such a language reflects the process by which the language's conventions originally evolved. We recorded participants' EEG as they learned one of these artificial space-time languages. Overall, the brain response to this artificial communication system was language-like, with, for instance, violations to the system's conventions eliciting an N400-like component. Over the course of learning, participants' brain responses developed in ways that paralleled the process by which the language had originally evolved, with early neural sensitivity to violations of a rapidly-evolving universal convention, and slowly developing neural sensitivity to an idiosyncratic convention that required slow social negotiation to emerge. This study opens up exciting avenues of future work to disentangle how neural biases influence learning and transmission in the emergence of structure in language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effect of speaking style on speech segmentation by statistical learning under optimal and adverse listening conditions. Similar to the intelligibility and memory benefits found in previous studies, enhanced acoustic-phonetic cues of the listener-oriented clear speech could improve speech segmentation by statistical learning compared to conversational speech. Yet, it could not be precluded that hyper-articulated clear speech, reported to have less pervasive coarticulation, would result in worse segmentation than conversational speech. We tested these predictions using an artificial language learning paradigm. Listeners who acquired English before age six were played continuous repetitions of the ‘words’ of an artificial language, spoken either clearly or conversationally and presented either in quiet or in noise at a signal-to-noise ratio of +3 or 0 dB SPL. Next, they recognized the artificial words in a two-alternative forced-choice test. Results supported the prediction that clear speech facilitates segmentation by statistical learning more than conversational speech but only in the quiet listening condition. This suggests that listeners can use clear speech acoustic-phonetic enhancements to guide speech processing dependent on domain-general, signal-independent statistical computations. However, there was no clear speech benefit in noise at either signal-to-noise ratio. We discuss possible mechanisms that could explain these results.

Experience with native-language prosody encourages language-specific strategies for speech segmentation. Conflicting findings from previous research suggest that these strategies may not be abstracted away from the acoustic manifestation of prosodic features in the native speech. Using the artificial language learning paradigm, the current study explores this possibility in connection with listeners of a lexical tone language called Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). In TSM, the only rising lexical tone occurs almost only on the final syllable of the language's tone sandhi domain and is phonetically associated with final lengthening. Based on these observations, Experiment I examined what constituted a sufficient finality cue for use by TSM listeners to support segmentation: (a) final fundamental frequency (F0) rise only; or (b) final F0 rise conjoined with final lengthening. The results showed that segmentation was inhibited by the former cue but facilitated by the latter. Experiment II showed that the facilitation cannot be attributed entirely to final lengthening, as a null effect was found when final lengthening was the sole prosodic cue to segmentation. It is thus assumed that acoustic details as fine-grained as the lengthening of the rising tone are involved in the modulation of the segmentation strategy whereby TSM listeners perceive F0 rise as signaling finality. The inhibitory effect of final F0 rise alone found in Experiment I motivated Experiment III, which revealed that initial F0 rise in the absence of lengthening cues improved TSM listeners' segmentation. It is speculated that such use of initial F0 rise might reflect a cross-linguistic segmentation solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Although statistical learning is not necessarily implicit in nature, it is often defined as learning that happens without awareness. This article investigates whether statistical learning in young children is indeed implicit, as often assumed. We trained 63 kindergarteners on a miniature language and assessed learning using a picture‐matching task. We used an opt‐out task to measure whether the kindergarteners possessed awareness of an acquired meaningful grammatical marker. In the opt‐out paradigm, participants demonstrate awareness by expressing uncertainty through a nonverbal response: opting out. Our results are compatible with an earlier study of which the present study is a partial replication, suggesting that kindergarteners can acquire this marker from distributional properties in the input. Furthermore, although none of the children could verbalize knowledge of the structure during exit interviews, their behavior during the opt‐out task indicated that they developed awareness of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tonal carryover assimilation, whereby a tone is assimilated to the preceding one, is conditioned by prosodic boundaries in a way suggesting that its presence may signal continuity or lack of a boundary. Its possibility as a speech segmentation cue was investigated in two artificial language (AL) learning experiments. Mandarin-speaking listeners identified the "words" of a three-tone AL (e.g., [pé.tī.kù]) after listening to six long speech streams in which the words were repeated continuously without pauses. The first experiment revealed that segmentation was disrupted in an "incongruent-cues" condition where tonal carryover assimilation occurred across AL word boundaries and conflicted with statistical regularities in the speech streams. Segmentation was neither facilitated nor inhibited in a "congruent-cues" condition where tonal carryover assimilation occurred only within the AL words in 27% of the repetitions and never across word boundaries. A null effect was again found for the congruent-cues condition of the second experiment, where all AL word repetitions carried tonal carryover assimilation. These findings show that tonal carryover assimilation is exploited to resolve segmentation problems when cues conflict. Its null effect in the congruent-cues conditions might be linked to cue redundancy and suggest that it is weighted low in the segmentation cue hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 gender agreement better when encouraged to learn from multiword units. Previous work has not examined two core predictions of this proposal: (1) that children also benefit from initial exposure to multiword units, and (2) that their learning patterns reflect a greater reliance on multiword units compared to adults. We test both predictions using an artificial-language. As predicted, both children and adults benefit from early exposure to multiword units. In addition, when exposed to unsegmented input – adults show better learning of nouns compared to article-noun pairings, but children do not, a pattern consistent with adults' predicted tendency to focus less on multiword units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work has used artificial language experiments to argue that hierarchical representations drive learners’ expectations about word order in complex noun phrases like these two green cars (Culbertson & Adger 2014; Martin, Ratitamkul, et al. 2019). When trained on a novel language in which individual modifiers come after the Noun, English speakers overwhelmingly assume that multiple nominal modifiers should be ordered such that Adjectives come closest to the Noun, then Numerals, then Demonstratives (i.e., N-Adj-Num-Dem or some subset thereof). This order transparently reflects a constituent structure in which Adjectives combine with Nouns to the exclusion of Numerals and Demonstratives, and Numerals combine with Noun+Adjective units to the exclusion of Demonstratives. This structure has also been claimed to derive frequency asymmetries in complex noun phrase order across languages (e.g., Cinque 2005). However, we show that features of the methodology used in these experiments potentially encourage participants to use a particular metalinguistic strategy that could yield this outcome without implicating constituency structure. Here, we use a more naturalistic artificial language learning task to investigate whether the preference for hierarchy-respecting orders is still found when participants do not use this strategy. We find that the preference still holds, and, moreover, as Culbertson & Adger (2014) speculate, that its strength reflects structural distance between modifiers. It is strongest when ordering Adjectives relative to Demonstratives, and weaker when ordering Numerals relative to Adjectives or Demonstratives relative to Numerals. Our results provide the strongest evidence yet for the psychological influence of hierarchical structure on word order preferences during learning.

Linguistic animacy reflects a particular construal of biological distinctions encountered in the world, passed through cultural and cognitive filters. This study explores the process by which our construal of animacy becomes encoded in the grammars of human languages. We ran an iterated learning experiment investigating the effect of animacy on language transmission. Participants engaged in a simple artificial language learning task in which they were asked to learn which affix was assigned to each noun in the language. Though initially random, the language each participant produced at test became the language that the subsequent participant in a chain was trained on. Results of the experiment were analysed in terms of learnability, measured through the accuracy of responses, and structure, using an entropy measure. We found that the learnability of languages increased over generations, as expected, but entropy did not decrease. Languages did not become formally simpler over time. Instead, structure emerged through a reorganisation of noun classes around animacy-based categories. The use of semantic animacy distinctions allowed languages to retain morphological complexity while becoming more learnable. Our study shows that grammatical reflexes of animacy distinctions can arise out of learning alone, and that structuring grammar based on animacy can make languages more learnable.

General vowel harmony and disharmony rules have comparable formal complexity but differ dramatically in typological frequency and phonetic motivation. Previous studies found no difference in learning between vowel harmony and disharmony; this putative equivalence has been used to discount the view that learners are influenced by substantive learning biases. In the current study, we use a more nuanced test to show that there is a clear difference in learning between vowel harmony and disharmony: learners readily infer a vowel harmony pattern, but not a disharmony pattern. The findings suggest that vowel disharmony is in fact strongly disfavored during learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phonological alternations often happen to conform to phonotactic regularities, from which a single mechanism for phonotactics and alternations has been claimed. We note, however, that empirical evidence supporting the link between phonotactics and alternations comes only from English native speakers whose first language (L1) does exhibit phonotactically motivated alternation patterns. This article examines whether the link between phonotactics and alternations is universally available. To do so, we test learning of phonotactics and alternations with Cantonese native speakers, whose L1 provides no evidence for or against the link. We address learning of a vowel harmony pattern through the use of three artificial languages; one with a harmony pattern both within and across stems, another with a harmony pattern only across stems; and the other with a disharmony pattern within stems but harmony across stems. Learners successfully acquired harmony phonotactics according to input patterns, but they showed no difference in learning alternation patterns across the three languages. Our results suggest that the link between phonotactics and alternations might be language-specific: Only upon receiving L1 evidence, learners can use a unified mechanism to encode phonotactics and alternations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, iterated learning studies have provided compelling evidence for the claim that linguistic structure can emerge from non‐structured input, through the process of transmission. However, it is unclear whether individuals differ in their tendency to add structure, an issue with implications for understanding who are the agents of change. Here, we identify and test two contrasting predictions: The first sees learning as a pre‐requisite for structure addition, and predicts a positive correlation between learning accuracy and structure addition, whereas the second maintains that it is those learners who struggle with learning and reproducing their input who add structure to it. This prediction is hard to test in standard iterated learning paradigms since each learner is exposed to a different input, and since structure and accuracy are computed using the same test items. Here, we test these contrasting predictions in two experiments using a one‐generation artificial language learning paradigm designed to provide independent measures of learning accuracy and structure addition. Adults (N = 48 in each study) were exposed to a semi‐regular language (with probabilistic structure) and had to learn it: Learning was assessed using seen items, whereas structure addition was calculated over unseen items. In both studies, we find a strong positive correlation between individuals' ability to learn the language and their tendency to add structure to it: Better learners also produced more structured languages. These findings suggest a strong link between learning and generalization. We discuss the implications of these findings for iterated language models and theories of language change more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a rich tradition of building computational models in cognitive science, but modeling, theoretical, and experimental research are not as tightly integrated as they could be. In this paper, we show that computational techniques—even simple ones that are straightforward to use—can greatly facilitate designing, implementing, and analyzing experiments, and generally help lift research to a new level. We focus on the domain of artificial grammar learning, and we give five concrete examples in this domain for (a) formalizing and clarifying theories, (b) generating stimuli, (c) visualization, (d) model selection, and (e) exploring the hypothesis space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies found cross‐linguistic structural priming with various language combinations. Here, we investigated the role of two important domains of language variation: case marking and word order, for transitive and ditransitive structures. We varied these features in an artificial language learning paradigm, using three different artificial language versions in a between‐subjects design. Priming was assessed between Dutch (no overt case marking, SVO word order) and a) an SVO order version, b) a case marking version, and c) an SOV order version. Similar within‐language and cross‐linguistic priming was found in all versions for transitives, indicating that cross‐linguistic structural priming was not hindered. In contrast, for ditransitives we found similar within‐language priming for all versions, but no cross‐linguistic priming. The finding that cross‐linguistic priming is possible between languages that vary in morphological marking or word order, is compatible with studies showing cross‐linguistic priming between natural languages that differ on these dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is substantial debate around the nature of letter position coding in reading. Research on a variety of Indo-European languages suggests uncertainty in position coding; for example, readers perceive transposed-letter stimuli (jugde) as similar to their base words (judge). However, these effects are not apparent for all languages. We developed a powerful new method to delineate how specific properties of a writing system shape the representation of letter position. Two groups of 24 adults learned to read novel words printed in artificial scripts. One group learned a dense orthography (i.e. with many anagrams) and one group learned a sparse orthography (i.e. no anagrams). Following four days of training, participants showed a larger transposed-letter effect in the sparse orthography than in the dense orthography. These results challenge existing models of orthographic processing in reading, and support the claim that orthographic representations are shaped by the nature of the writing system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tendency for languages to use harmonic word order patterns—orders that place heads in a consistent position with respect to modifiers or other dependents—has been noted since the 1960s. As with many other statistical typological tendencies, there has been debate regarding whether harmony reflects properties of human cognition or forces external to it. Recent research using laboratory language learning has shown that children and adults find harmonic patterns easier to learn than nonharmonic patterns (Culbertson & Newport, 2015; Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012). This supports a link between learning and typological frequency: if harmonic patterns are easier to learn, while nonharmonic patterns are more likely to be targets of change, then, all things equal, harmonic patterns will be more frequent in the world’s languages. However, these previous studies relied on variation in the input as a mechanism for change in the lab; learners were exposed to variable word order, allowing them to shift the frequencies of different orders so that harmonic patterns became more frequent. Here we teach adult and child learners languages that are consistently nonharmonic, with no variation. While adults perfectly maintain these consistently nonharmonic patterns, young child learners innovate novel orders, changing nonharmonic patterns into harmonic ones.

Statistical learning (SL) involving sensitivity to distributional regularities in the environment has been suggested to be an important factor in many aspects of cognition, including language. However, the degree to which statistically-learned information is retained over time is not well understood. To establish whether or not learners are able to preserve such regularities over time, we examined performance on an artificial second language learning task both immediately after training and also at a follow-up session 2 weeks later. Participants were exposed to an artificial language (Brocanto2), half of them receiving simplified training items in which only 20% of sequences contained complex structures, whereas the other half were exposed to a training set in which 80% of the items were composed of complex sequences. Overall, participants showed signs of learning at the first session and retention at the second, but the degree of learning was affected by the nature of the training they received. Participants exposed to the simplified input outperformed those in the more complex training condition. A GLMM was used to model the relationship between stimulus properties and participants’ endorsement strategies across both sessions. The results indicate that participants in the complex training condition relied more on an item’s chunk strength than those in the simple training condition. Taken together, this set of findings shows that statistically learned regularities are retained over the course of 2 weeks. The results also demonstrate that training on input featuring simple items leads to improved learning and retention of grammatical regularities.