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Although there is a broad consensus that both the procedural and declarative memory systems play a crucial role in language learning, use, and knowledge, the mapping between linguistic types and memory structures remains underspecified: by default, a dual-route mapping of language systems to memory systems is assumed, with declarative memory handling idiosyncratic lexical knowledge and procedural memory handling rule-governed knowledge of grammar. We experimentally contrast the processing of morphology (case and aspect), syntax (subordination), and lexical semantics (collocations) in a healthy L1 population of Polish, a language rich in form distinctions. We study the processing of these four types under two conditions: a single task condition in which the grammaticality of stimuli was judged and a concurrent task condition in which grammaticality judgments were combined with a digit span task. Dividing attention impedes access to declarative memory while leaving procedural memory unaffected and hence constitutes a test that dissociates which types of linguistic information each long-term memory construct subserves. Our findings confirm the existence of a distinction between lexicon and grammar as a generative, dual-route model would predict, but the distinction is graded, as usage-based models assume: the hypothesized grammar-lexicon opposition appears as a continuum on which grammatical phenomena can be placed as being more or less "ruly" or "idiosyncratic." However, usage-based models, too, need adjusting as not all types of linguistic knowledge are proceduralized to the same extent. This move away from a simple dichotomy fundamentally changes how we think about memory for language, and hence how we design and interpret behavioral and neuroimaging studies that probe into the nature of language cognition.

Full-fledged grammatical article systems as attested in Germanic and Romance languages are rather uncommon from a typological perspective. The frequency with which articles occur in these languages, together with the difficulty encountered in detecting them and the lack of a water-tight account of article use, make article errors one of the most frequent errors in language produced by L2 learners whose L1 does not feature an article system of similar complexity, all the while appearing unproblematic for L1 users. We present a conceptually and methodologically interdisciplinary approach to the grammatical category of articles in English and combine a usage-based, cognitive linguistic account of the function and use of articles that respects its discourse-based nature with a computational exploration of the challenges the system poses from the perspective of learning. Running a statistical classifier on a large sample of spoken and written discourse chunks extracted from the BNC and annotated for the five main determinants of article use reveals that Hearer Knowledge is the driver of a hierarchical system. Once Hearer Knowledge is acknowledged as the motivating principle of the category, article use becomes eminently predictable and restrictions are in line with the forms from which the articles have developed historically, with the and a acting as category defaults and zero acting as default override. Simulations with a computational model anchored in the psychology of learning shed light on whether and how human cognition would handle the proposed relations detected in the data. We find that different articles have different learnability profiles that, again, are in line with their historical development: while the can be learned from one strong indicator, the relationships for the zero article are less exclusive. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the article category appears as a referent tracking system that grammaticalizes the principles of “audience design”: it forces a speaker to track and mark reference from the vantage point of the memory of the hearer, thereby reducing the processing effort required from the hearer. This particular mindset inverses the typologically dominant situation in which this information is not explicitly marked by the speaker but implicitly retrieved from context by the hearer.

Non-native speakers have been found to be penalized for their accent and grammatical errors. However, little is known about whether and how accent and grammaticality interact to influence native listeners’ perception of non-native speech, and whether listeners’ personality plays a role in this. We examined these questions by relating the acceptability scores of 40 English speech stimuli rated by 60 British listeners (30 female; 30 unfamiliar with accented speech) to factors including speech accent (British vs. Polish), grammaticality (well-formed vs. error-filled) and listener personality. The results suggest that non-native accent “protects” the speaker from being penalized for grammatical errors unless the listener has a certain personality profile: compared to non-native accented speech, the acceptability ratings of native accented speech showed a larger decrease when grammatical errors were present, yet listeners who were more conscientious, extravert or agreeable tended to give lower acceptability ratings to non-native accented speech, regardless of grammaticality.

Dividing attention by loading working memory is an effective method of probing the declarative and procedural underpinnings of linguistic knowledge. The current study explores WM/DA effects on four specific L2 domains: morphology (aspect versus case), syntax and semantics (collocations). We contrast performance of 68 learners of Polish as a foreign language (L1 Chinese) in a grammaticality judgement task in baseline and divided attention conditions. We found corroborating evidence for heightened dependency on declarative memory in early (A2) L2 learners across all linguistic categories and in both experimental conditions. While the lexical judgement of more advanced (B1) learners also proved vulnerable to secondary-task interference, introduction of additional cognitive load had a positive effect on participants’ grammatical judgement, yielding more accurate responses in the aspect category. These results point towards the need for pursuing a new line of inquiry into a potentially facilitative role of cognitive load on L2 learners’ grammatical processing.

The current study investigated the contributions of working memory, vocabulary size, education and age to letter fluency performance in healthy adults (N = 50, mean age = 26.5). We administered a letter fluency task using three stimulus letters (F, A, S). Using Bayesian generalized linear mixed model analysis, we established independent contributions of each predictor to letter fluency performance. While our results demonstrate that age, vocabulary size, education level and, to a lesser extent, working memory capacity contribute to performance on the letter fluency task, they also indicate a complex interplay of these factors. The results highlight the importance of separately assessing various verbal and executive skills in combination with demographic factors when using fluency tasks as indicators of adults' general verbal skill., Author(s): Srdan Medimorec [sup.1] , Petar Milin [sup.2] , Dagmar Divjak [sup.2] [sup.3] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.26597.3f, 0000 0001 2325 1783, Department of Psychology, Teesside University, , Tees Valley, TS1 [...]

While the effects of pattern learning on language processing are well known, the way in which pattern learning shapes exploratory behavior has long gone unnoticed. We report on the way in which individual differences in statistical pattern learning affect performance in the domain of language along multiple dimensions. Analyzing data from healthy monolingual adults' performance on a serial reaction time task and a self-paced reading task, we show how individual differences in statistical pattern learning are reflected in readers' knowledge of linguistic co-occurrence patterns and in their exploration and exploitation of content-specific and task-general information. First, we investigated the extent to which an individual's pattern learning correlates with his or her sensitivity to systematic morphological and syntactic co-occurrences, as evidenced while reading authentic sentences. We found that the stream of morphological and syntactic information has a more pronounced effect on the reading speed of, as we will label them, content-sensitive learners in that the more probable the co-occurrence pattern, the faster their reading of that pattern will be. Next, we investigated how differences in pattern learning are reflected in the ways in which individuals approach the reading task itself and adapt to it. Casting this relation in terms of exploration/exploitation strategies, known from Reinforcement Learning, we conclude that content-sensitive learners are also more likely to initially probe (explore) a wider range of directly relevant patterns, which they can later use (exploit) to optimize their reading performance further. By affecting exploratory behavior, pattern learning influences the information that is gathered and becomes available for exploitation, thereby increasing the effect pattern learning has on language cognition.